[tz] [PROPOSED] Merge timezones that are alike since 1970

[Stephen Colebourne]

On Sun, 30 May 2021 at 01:59, Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
> On 5/29/21 5:24 PM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
> > It is hugely "political" to say that Norway or Sweden are of no
> > importance to tzdb.
>
> It would be "political" to say that, but nobody is saying that. Norway
> and Sweden are just as important to tzdb as Angola, Slovakia, etc. Those
> other countries don't have distinct Zones, and there's no justification
> (other than inertia) for treating Norway and Sweden differently.

The politics is entirely of your own making. Each of these *countries*
should have a full non-Link zone. It is entirely wrong that they do
not.

> The guidelines say that tzdb doesn't attempt to track boundary changes
> due to wars in any detailed way. It would be impractical for tzdb to do
> otherwise, given its current organization. I haven't seen any realistic
> proposal to change this.

No one is asking for tadb to track *borders* or boundary changes. I,
and others, expect tzdb to track the impact that Governmental
authorities (eg. countries) have on the time-zone of a location with a
consistent reliable ID and data at a minimum per-country.

> > And you've had repeated pushback from the list on your ill-advised
> > "cleanups".
>
> And despite repeated predictions of serious problems, cleanups to remove
> unnecessarily political data have worked out well. To the extent that
> they've forestalled political disputes they've been a net plus for the
> project. (Of course it is hard to show a negative.)

Let me be clear - this change cannot stand. The reliability of TZDB
has declined considerably over the past few years, but it is time to
say enough is enough. This is where the line in the sand needs to be
drawn.

Stephen