Stephen Colebourne wrote:

On Thu, 23 Sept 2021 at 09:52, Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

...

On 9/22/21 2:53 AM, Almaz Mingaleev wrote:

...

What equity, diversity or inclusion issues were in 2021a?

Locations in countries like Norway and Sweden got special treatment by being Zones, whereas locations in countries like Angola and Ethiopia were only Links.

Taken at face value, it is easy for anyone reading this to nod their head and agree that Norway should not receive favouritism over Angola.

What it fails to state is that the solution adopted (creating Links where previously there were Zones) has created a *different* equity, diversity or inclusion issue. The resulting tzdb state clearly favours Berlin over Oslo or Stockholm, Brussels over Amsterdam.

Guys, PLEASE!!! That is ridiculous. Stop that madness. The distinction between Zones and Links is an internal implementation detail. It makes no practical difference [*]. Why should users care whether their location is a Zone or a Link? Why would they even need to know? If anybody actually complained about their favourite location not getting a "first-class treatment", I believe that "Get a life!" would be a fully deserved answer. [*] That changing an existing Zone to a Link might alter some data for that location is another issue that IMHO deserves consideration. Basically, it's a matter of deciding how much you commit to backward compatibility, and whether the impacted data are within the scope of that commitment. But that's completely orthogonal to the bogus "favouritism" issue. Gerardo