[tz] proposed changes: past Altai/Tomsk time zone shifts

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Fri, 4 May 2012 18:43:02 +0200
    From:        Tobias Conradi <tobias.conradi at gmail.com>
    Message-ID:  <CAAGevbXDvN47usaq3DXj-Y6+M8PCQx3vmVTrc4RcpJLBhuOubg at mail.gmail.com>

  | > So, what is the effect
  | > if we put it into the wrong timezone?
  | The database would contain a bug according to tzcode2011i/Theory:

No, not necessarily - it doesn't really matter if we guess incorrectly
what time conversion happens at some particular place, only if there is
no zone that represents the correct conversions for some place or other.

Note the theory file (which we could adjust if we ever needed to incidentally)
just says that the world is partitioned into regions, not that this
project is attempting to specify the boundaries of those regions.  Nor
does it say that the regions must be connected, or anything much about them,
other than that they exist.

For the islands in question, provided that we have some zone defined that
correctly represents the time conversions used there, then we have no bug
worth worrying much about.  If the comments in the zone file are wrong,
we should certainly fix them sometime, but there's no great urgency to
do that - they have no real importance and are generally only ever even
seen by the people on this list (no-one else is really very likely to
read through all of that stuff - zic certainly doesn't care.)

kre