[tz] [PATCH] Replace some zones with links when that doesn't lose useful info.

[Marc Lehmann]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 09:58:29PM -0700, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> The standards haven't changed.  Nor are the proposed changes

As a long-time lurker, I beg to differ. Maybe the word "standards" is
misleading, but the effective maintainance has definitely changed. Never
before did I hear that changes from one set of (likely bogus) data
to another set of (likely bogus) data is ok because it doesn't cause
"signficant disruption".

> entries are. They're really bad.  I can't prove it, but I have the
> strong impression that most of the entries that we haven't already
> checked were simply invented.  If I'd known how bad they were I would
> not have put them there in the first place.

That may well be, but replacing one set of invented data by another set of
invented data doesn't seem to be an obvious improvement.

> >most people seem to have been concerned about stability of timestamps. not
> >about accuracy, correctness or regression testing.
> 
> I doubt whether there's a genuine lack of concern about accuracy or
> correctness.

Who is concerned that the older data is less accurate/correct than the
newer one and therefore the data needs to be changed?

> On the contrary, I think we all want the data to be as accurate and
> correct as it can be.  The only dispute here is how much stability
> trumps these other concerns.

What other concerns? The new data isn't more accurate or more correct than
the old one, it's just different.

Correctness and accuracy do trump stability, but neither accuracy nor
correctness seem to be involved in this change - the change simply lumps
together zones because the pre-1970 data was deemed incorrect, without
there being reason to believe that this merge improves either correctness
or accuracy.

People in this discussion primarily complain about needless instability,
not about instability caused by fixes.

-- 
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