[tz] Deprecating POSIX Zones to Links?

[Justin Grant]

Hi TZ friends - I'm one of the volunteers working on ECMAScript's time zone
strategy.

We had a question: of all the legacy Zone names in TZDB, why have a few of
them like "WET" and "EST5EDT" been retained as Zones, while the rest of the
legacy names like "GB-Eire" and "Jamaica" have all been turned into Links
pointing to some other Zone?  What was special about the Zones below that
caused them to stay as Zones?

EST
MST
HST
EST5EDT
CST6CDT
MST7MDT
PST8PDT
WET
CET
MET
EET

Regardless of the history behind these 11 Zone names, would there be
interest in accepting a PR that turns these Zones into Links?

I'm asking because ECMAScript's time zone enumeration API is specified to
only return Zone names, but ECMAScript implementations in Safari and Chrome
have long omitted the Zones above from their enumeration API because they
create redundant and confusing results for end users. We'd like to align
the specification to web reality, and ideally make these changes upstream
in TZDB (if that would be welcome).

Here's the mappings that we're currently considering in ECMAScript. We used
the TZ approach of preferring the largest city for each of the DST-using
legacy Zones. Although any other mappings would be OK with us, so let me
know if you think there are more appropriate mappings.

EST => Etc/GMT+5
MST => Etc/GMT+7
HST => Etc/GMT+10
EST5EDT => America/New_York
CST6CDT => America/Chicago
MST7MDT => America/Denver
PST8PDT => America/Los_Angeles
WET => Europe/Lisbon
CET => Europe/Berlin
MET => Europe/Berlin
EET => Europe/Kyiv
Thanks,
Justin Grant
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