On Sat, Oct 4, 2014, at 06:15, Stephen Colebourne wrote:

The key point to remember is that Joda-Time has been running for many years and has striven very hard to retain backwards compatibility. Converting aliases to their underlying zone has worked well over many years, and is far from an unreasonable approach, as it reduces the effect of older zones such as US-Pacific.

The effect of those zones is limited to when the user has actually selected them. For that matter, if aliases were not normalized, you would have _maintained_ backwards compatibility when (in principle - in reality, that was before Joda-Time was even a thing.) the zone name was changed _from_ those older names in the first place. The point of aliases is to limit the impact of changes on users who selected the old name when it was current, by keeping the behavior of their systems the same. "Normalizing" them goes against that principle.