[tz] Unacceptable recent changes [wasRe: [PATCH 2/4] Move obsolescent Americas entries to 'backward'.]

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/28/13 09:20, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> Many users will have stored data in databases or other
> long term storage that refers to these time-zones being made obsolete.

The zones are not being made obsolete.  TZ=America/Atikokan
will still work, and will give the same results as before
for post-1970 timestamps, which are the only timestamps in
scope for this project.

I sincerely doubt that the proposed change will cause any
problem in practice.  It's simply not the case that "many users"
have pre-1970 timestamps for Atikokan and will notice or
care about the proposed change.  After all, the pre-1970 data
for Atikokan was almost surely incorrect, and nobody cared
about that either.

That being said, I do take the point that we should not
discard the old data even if it's wrong or problematic, so
I'll work on a further patch that will resurrect it, along
the lines already suggested.