[tz] Dealing with Pre-1970 Data

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 1 September 2013 02:18, Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> I.e., grandfather in *existing* tzids that exist only to record history before 1970, leaving them in the non-"extended" part of the database, but don't add *new* such tzids to the non-"extended" part of the database?

Yes. Currently, no one is working on such extended data, so there is
no issue. The "extended" file is a simple option to keep any
additional data separate. It would also be possible for such data to
be in a completely separate project, sharing the same file format, and
that may be more acceptable to some.

Note that I do not care about pre-1970 data for locations that are not
currently in the tzdb (before the recent destruction). I do care about
the pre-1970 data of existing IDs, but only to the extent that they
are maintained or enhanced and not deleted. Others may care
differently, but I believe my needs are in line with Theory and
long-standing practice.


> I went back through the archive and, if the controversial changes are the ones from the "Move links to 'backward' if they exist only because of country codes." message, I'm probably missing something, as that doesn't appear to be discarding existing pre-1970 splits, at least from the description.)

There are two real issues in the threads -
(1) what to do about pre-1970 data in general (where I object to its
deletion as part of merging IDs)
(2) the removal of the 16 year old rule wrt one zone per ISO-3166 code
The "Move links" stuff is about (2), not (1).

thanks
Stephen