Question on id stability

[Jonathan Lennox]

On Monday, January 3 2005, "Paul Eggert" wrote to "Mark Davis, Tz (tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov)" saying:

> "Mark Davis" <mark.davis at jtcsv.com> writes:
> 
> > I'm inclined to recommend that we maintain stability as of a given
> > date; that we never change an ID after that point.
> >
> > 1. Would there be any downside to such a policy?
> 
> Only if somebody builds the database without the "backwards" file,
> which lists the backwards-compatibility names.  The default is to
> include "backwards", as it includes very common IDs like US/Pacific.
> I'd be surprised (but not astonished) if someone omitted it.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to separate the old-style names
(US/Eastern, etc.) from compatibility versions of old Area/Location names.
It seems like FreeBSD and similar systems would in general want to have the
latter even if not the former.

-- 
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs dot columbia dot edu