[tz] Dealing with Pre-1970 Data

[Guy Harris]

On Sep 1, 2013, at 10:47 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> If I understand this proposal correctly, it would replace
> tz's current LMT values with values that are less-precise,

It would replace them with values that are less close to the value for some particular location in the city whose name is used to form the tzid, less close to some other locations in the zone corresponding to the tzid, and *closer* to yet other locations in the tzid.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a feature, not a bug, as it shoves a cream pie in the face of developers and users who think that Europe/Paris corresponds to the city of Paris rather than to a region of Europe in which Paris is or was, at some particular point in time, the most populous city.

> I don't see how
> changing 0:09:21 to 0 would improve the quality of the
> database entry for Paris.

It's a database entry for a region of Europe, not for Paris.  If it's an entry for Paris, rather than for the French time zone, why don't we have entries for Lyon and Lille and Toulouse and Marseilles and Nice and Cannes and Grenoble and...?