[tz] Issues with pre-1970 information in TZDB

[Tom Lane]

Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> On 9/23/21 10:31 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> That's fine, but if that is the policy, then the data should in fact be
>> valid (to the best of our ability) for the named location.

> Oh, sorry, I should have been clear that I was talking about Zones and 
> not Links. Links don't follow that rule, and never have.

I think that's a pretty arbitrary and wrongheaded policy, mainly
because end users don't know the difference between a zone and a link.
All that they can see is whether the data associated with a name is
correct for that location; and I maintain that it always should be.

Basically the problem here is that the link mechanism, which was
(I suppose) designed to serve just to provide common aliases for
a zone name, has been abused to allow substitution of more- or less-
accurate data for the same zone name.  That wasn't a good idea,
and its shortcomings are becoming more obvious as more zones are
subjected to this abuse.

			regards, tom lane