[tz] draft of change summary for next tz release

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Tue Sep 17 23:14:03 UTC 2013


Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> writes:
> On 17 September 2013 22:38, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

>>   Changes affecting time stamps before 1970
>>
>>     Some zones have been turned into links, when they differ from
>>     existing zones only in older data that was likely invented or that
>>     differs only in LMT or transition from LMT.  These changes affect
>>     only time stamps before 1943.  The affected zones are:
>>     Africa/Juba, America/Anguilla, America/Aruba, America/Dominica,
>>     America/Grenada, America/Guadeloupe, America/Marigot,
>>     America/Montserrat, America/St_Barthelemy, America/St_Kitts,
>>     America/St_Lucia, America/St_Thomas, America/St_Vincent,
>>     America/Tortola, and Europe/Vaduz.

> From my perspective, these are the only changes that concern me. The
> change was IMO unecessary, deleted longstanding information and gained
> little if anything in return.

The longstanding information appears to be of negative value, so losing it
is itself a gain, I think.  It means less unsourced or poorly-sourced data
that people can be fooled into thinking is actually meaningful.

Someone who wants to tackle this problem can certainly work out
higher-quality information about transitions and pre-standardized time
offsets, and such data seems, to me at least, like it would be valuable to
record in an expanded database.  But the data in question here seems to
just be a meaningless distraction from that effort.  It doesn't appear to
be of sufficient quality to serve as a foundation for further work.

(Thanks to Paul for the extensive discussion and background for the
Europe/Vaduz change.)

Given that, I support making this change.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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