[tz] [PROPOSED] Rename internal identifiers to match RFC 8536

[Stephen Colebourne]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2019 at 18:23, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> On 6/16/19 11:50 PM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> > This is clearly a change to the API as seen by downstream consumers.
> > Some downstream consumers may well parse the file and look for a
> > column named "GMTOFF".
>
> The "GMTOFF"-to-"DSTOFF" change affects only comments, which are clearly
> not part of the API: the comments are not present in the tzdata.zi file
> that is input to zic in the reference Makefile, and they are not
> invariably spelled the same way in the source so it's unlikely they're
> (incorrectly) being relied on by downstream consumers. We could change
> ziguard.awk to change DSTOFF to GMTOFF in the rearguard format's
> comments, and this would suffice to handle the problem if it arises,
> though I doubt that it will.

:facepalm:
Isn't it obvious that this is more fiddling for the sake of fiddling?
Why can't the project just focus on the backwards compatible capture
of date and time offsets?
I despair.
Stephen