On 9/20/21 2:58 PM, Robert Elz wrote:
If someone in (or from) Angola or Niger wants th research their timezone history, and send it, it should be included, just like that for the US,
Yes, and there's a place for that in 'backzone'. We're not refusing timezone history because it's unnecessary due to the alike-since-1970 rule. It's put into 'backzone' and is welcome there. Perhaps some people have the misimpression that we have many potential contributors whose data are being refused. On the contrary, almost nobody contributes historical data, because it's boring unpaid work and honestly, it's not that important. I know that, because I contributed the vast majority of 'backzone' (a contribution that I'm coming more and more to regret :-). This disagreement is not about whether the data in question are available; it's only about which file they're in. Nothing is being "wiped out" or refused.
I've always believed that there should be at least one zone for every time zone authority on the planet
That would be ideal, and I hope something like that would be doable for current and future timestamps. But it'd be a stretch to try to do it for all timestamps since 1970, and it'd be completely impractical for pre-1970 timestamps. We don't know who the historical time zone authorities were, much less what rules they used.
The only real cost is a little extra processing time generating the zones, and a trivial amount of zone data files.
I think this greatly underestimate the effort to do a complete job. We'd eventually need thousands of Zones. I expect we'd have to revamp the underlying technology too, and do something more like what Shanks evidently did (though I haven't seen his source code). I would not consider that trivial, and I think our collective effort would be better spent elsewhere.