[tz] [PROPOSED] Support zi parsers that mishandle negative DST offsets

[Steve Summit]

Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> To be clear here, as the maintainer of the project, you are
> effectively asking some of its key consumers to fork the project.
> I find that pretty astonishing.

No, he's not asking you to fork the project, although I understand
why it seems that way to you.  Analogously, you're not trying to
hijack the project, although I have to say it seems that way to me.

As I understand it, the OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda projects are
currently set up so that millions of Java end users are using
the zic input files directly, without modification, and they're
fetching the files directly from iana.org.  That's a pretty
constraining situation!  And as long as things work that way,
you're *never* going to be in favor of *any* change to the zic
input file format, because you're never going to be able to
assure yourself that all of those millions of users are going
to upgrade their software any time soon.

There have already been multiple incompatibilities (how does
OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda deal with more than two time variants
per year, by the way?), and there will certainly be more.
So migrating to a strategy that could loosen the currently
too-tight coupling between the projects would be to the benefit
of all concerned, don't you think?