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

[Derick Rethans]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2014, Stephen Colebourne wrote:

> On 9 July 2014 16:16, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> > Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> >>
> >> As we have discussed before, changes like this are disruptive to 
> >> many people. The LMT and early time values are used out there, 
> >> irrespective of their accuracy.
> >
> > It was discussed at some length, and to some extent we're just 
> > repeating that discussion now.  There's one thing new, though: we 
> > now have had significant practical experience.  The earlier set of 
> > changes along these lines was published in release 2013e 
> > (2013-09-19), and it hasn't caused significant disruption in the 
> > field.  In practice it seems that end users don't much care about 
> > things like the time zone of Guadeloupe in 1899 -- which is probably 
> > a good thing, since the pre-2013e database was wrong anyway.
> 
> Well it seems that you're going to make the change no matter what, so 
> talking about it does feel rather futile. Its no surprise that 
> changing relatively minor locations results in few issues. Nor is it a 
> surprise that this list wouldn't hear of any issues, because its so 
> far from end users. I can guarantee that the data you have and are 
> planning to destroy is in somebodies database somewhere as both 
> Joda-Time and Java SE 8 expose the full data right back to and 
> including LMT to all users for all zones.
> 
> As I said last time, the issue isn't removing wrong values, its about 
> replacing them with even more wrong ones. The LMT values in 
> particular, which used to have some meaning, now do not. If you had 
> proposed an alternate way to define LMT values (which were based on 
> the actual city location) then I might be less frustrated. Instead we 
> are back to taking a sledgehammer to data that wasn't causing anyone 
> any harm, replacing it with data that is clearly worse.

Let me just voice my agreement to this statement.

cheers,
Derick

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