[tz] draft of change summary for next tz release

[David Patte ₯]

I agree its possible that the transition dates may not be known to be 
perfect.

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? 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.


On 2013-09-17 19:14, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> writes:
>> On 17 September 2013 22:38, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>>>    Changes affecting time stamps before 1970
>>>
>>>      Some zones have been turned into links, when they differ from
>>>      existing zones only in older data that was likely invented or that
>>>      differs only in LMT or transition from LMT.  These changes affect
>>>      only time stamps before 1943.  The affected zones are:
>>>      Africa/Juba, America/Anguilla, America/Aruba, America/Dominica,
>>>      America/Grenada, America/Guadeloupe, America/Marigot,
>>>      America/Montserrat, America/St_Barthelemy, America/St_Kitts,
>>>      America/St_Lucia, America/St_Thomas, America/St_Vincent,
>>>      America/Tortola, and Europe/Vaduz.
>>  From my perspective, these are the only changes that concern me. The
>> change was IMO unecessary, deleted longstanding information and gained
>> little if anything in return.
> The longstanding information appears to be of negative value, so losing it
> is itself a gain, I think.  It means less unsourced or poorly-sourced data
> that people can be fooled into thinking is actually meaningful.
>
> Someone who wants to tackle this problem can certainly work out
> higher-quality information about transitions and pre-standardized time
> offsets, and such data seems, to me at least, like it would be valuable to
> record in an expanded database.  But the data in question here seems to
> just be a meaningless distraction from that effort.  It doesn't appear to
> be of sufficient quality to serve as a foundation for further work.
>
> (Thanks to Paul for the extensive discussion and background for the
> Europe/Vaduz change.)
>
> Given that, I support making this change.
>


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