[tz] Undoing the effect of the new alike-since-1970 patch

[Paul Eggert]

On 6/10/21 4:28 PM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:

> If a statement is to be made it should be in both news and theory.

Sure, that could be done. Proposed draft attached. I have not installed 
this in the development sources.

> - no pre-1970 data in the main files (*all* pre-1970 data would be in
> separate files, and opt-in)

It should be easy to get the effect of this, by running the command 
'make ZFLAGS=-r at 0', which omits pre-1970 data in the generated TZif 
files. A similar option could be added to the Java-based equivalent to 
zic. If that doesn't suffice for some reason, we could add a flag to 
generate a tarball with pre-1970 data removed from the source files; 
this would be like the already-existing rearguard-format tarball except 
it would be an independent option.

> - revert the patch and any previous patches that merged zones across
> country borders

This alternative is less appealing, for reasons already discussed. I 
think we're better off with a technical compromise, such as 'make' 
one-liner mentioned above, or something like the compromise I suggested 
at the start of this thread 
<https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-June/030220.html>.
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