[tz] draft of change summary for next tz release

[Russ Allbery]

David Patte ₯ <dpatte at relativedata.com> writes:

> Maybe I am misunderstanding, but doesn't this proposal, in effect,
> removes the ability of us documenting improved transition dates in areas
> outside of the active regions?

No, any zone that's turned into a link can be trivially turned back into a
zone with its own rules with no user-visible impact.

> I thought the goal was to increase the overall accuracy and usability of
> the complete database. But the current proposal removes timezone
> information, and also removes a way of recording improvements when they
> are discovored.

I think you have misunderstood what a link is in the tz database.  All a
link says is that the given zone has exactly the same time transitions and
abbreviations as another given zone.  It doesn't remove any timezone
information at all.  If there is high-quality information for that zone,
it can be made not a link (by copying the rules of the zone to which it
was linked) and then modified to include that information.

The end user of the tz database doesn't know whether a zone identifier is
a link or not.  It behaves the same way either way from the user
perspective.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>