[tz] Unacceptable recent changes [wasRe: [PATCH 2/4] Move obsolescent Americas entries to 'backward'.]

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Aug 28, 2013, at 12:46 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> On 08/28/13 09:20, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
>> Many users will have stored data in databases or other
>> long term storage that refers to these time-zones being made obsolete.
> 
> The zones are not being made obsolete.  TZ=America/Atikokan
> will still work, and will give the same results as before
> for post-1970 timestamps, which are the only timestamps in
> scope for this project.

I don't agree, and the Theory file you pointed to does not, either.  It mentions "1970" in 8 places, none of which say anything remotely like "dates before 1970 are out of scope".  On the contrary, dates prior to 1970 are explicitly mentioned in the "Scope of the tz database" section.  The most you can argue from its words is that data prior to 1970 is definitely not complete (as opposed to later data, which at least aims to be complete though it might not succeed).

It's pretty clear to me that there is not "rough consensus and running code" for the changes you have proposed.

	paul