[tz] [PATCH 2/3] Replace some zones with links when that doesn't lose non-LMT info.

[Paul Eggert]

On 09/04/13 11:21, Steve Allen wrote:
>>  But ordinary
>> > users won't care that time stamps in Aruba on February 12,
>> > 1912 from 04:35:47 to 04:40:24 UTC will have a UTC offset
>> > that differs by a few minutes.  They just won't.
> I request caution in making it clear to ordinary users that the name
> UTC cannot be proleptically extended to dates prior to 1960.
> No such concept existed in contemporary records.

Yeowch!  You're right; sorry about that.  I should have
written "GMT".  I was misled by zdump's output.

Should we change the output of "zdump" etc to fix this
error?  Currently zdump says "UTC" for old time stamps,
which isn't correct.  Should it say "UT"
instead?  Or is even "UT" a bad idea for a time stamp
in (say) 1627?

I also should have mentioned that even with GMT,
my comment was incorrect in some sense.
Common practice back then for Dutch possessions was
to use non-integer offsets from GMT, and the tz
format cannot represent these.  I don't have good
data for Aruba, but Capt. Thomas Henry Tizard
of the Royal Navy reported that Curacao's port
kept time at -04:35:46.9; see Milne 1899.