[tz] [PATCH] Replace some zones with links when that doesn't lose useful info.

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 9 July 2014 16:16, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Stephen Colebourne wrote:
>>
>> As we have discussed before, changes like this are disruptive to many
>> people. The LMT and early time values are used out there, irrespective
>> of their accuracy.
>
> It was discussed at some length, and to some extent we're just repeating
> that discussion now.  There's one thing new, though: we now have had
> significant practical experience.  The earlier set of changes along these
> lines was published in release 2013e (2013-09-19), and it hasn't caused
> significant disruption in the field.  In practice it seems that end users
> don't much care about things like the time zone of Guadeloupe in 1899 --
> which is probably a good thing, since the pre-2013e database was wrong
> anyway.

Well it seems that you're going to make the change no matter what, so
talking about it does feel rather futile. Its no surprise that
changing relatively minor locations results in few issues. Nor is it a
surprise that this list wouldn't hear of any issues, because its so
far from end users. I can guarantee that the data you have and are
planning to destroy is in somebodies database somewhere as both
Joda-Time and Java SE 8 expose the full data right back to and
including LMT to all users for all zones.

As I said last time, the issue isn't removing wrong values, its about
replacing them with even more wrong ones. The LMT values in
particular, which used to have some meaning, now do not. If you had
proposed an alternate way to define LMT values (which were based on
the actual city location) then I might be less frustrated. Instead we
are back to taking a sledgehammer to data that wasn't causing anyone
any harm, replacing it with data that is clearly worse.

<shakes head in despair>
Stephen