[tz] Recent conversions of zones to aliases

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 3 October 2014 01:27, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>> The recent change to map Harare to Maputo broke a test in Joda-Time
> Did Joda-Time's regression tests also fail for 2014h's changes to Jamaica
> time in early 1974?  Those changes are for more-recent time stamps, time
> stamps that are in scope for the tz database.

The test broke because it is no longer possible to obtain a zone in
Joda-Time with the ID "Africa/Harare", however we map the CAT short ID
to Harare.

>> there should be at
>> least one actual Zone entry for each ISO defined territory/country,
> That has never been true of the tz database.  Adding such a requirement now
> would result in more political churn and maintenance overhead, something we
> already have too much of.  There is a real benefit to keeping our distance
> from politics, even if this means some regression tests need to be updated.

Far far more churn has been created through these unecessary and
artificial actions. This notion of "distance from politics" is absurd
IMO, Marks reply gives more detail about how things have changed, and
how the value of the data has been well and truly degraded. I use it
now because I have no alternative, not because I approve of the way
the data is maintained, Personally I'd love to see CLDR take over the
project and apply some decent engineering rigour to one of the most
important data sets in the world.

Stephen