[tz] [PROPOSED] Merge timezones that are alike since 1970

[Tom Lane]

Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> writes:
> On 5/22/21 11:17 AM, Tim Parenti wrote:
>> In particular, the latter group (things
>> like America/La_Paz -> Etc/GMT+4) seems to encourage things or behaviors
>> which historically cause confusion, especially for novices:

> We could avoid these problems by merging Etc/GMT+4 into America/La_Paz 
> rather than vice versa. That would be easy to arrange, and would result 
> in the same number of timezones. A downside would be that TZ='Etc/GMT+4' 
> would no longer be equivalent to TZ='<-04>4' for pre-1970 timestamps, 
> but those timestamps are out of scope anyway.

That seems really bad.  If I ask for Etc/GMT+4, I should get a fixed
GMT+4 offset for all time, not whatever the heck Bolivia's pre-1970
behavior was.  Those zone names are not, or at least should not be,
conditional on political decisions.  IMO, Etc/GMT+4 is just an
alternative way to spell the '<-04>4' notation ... one that could
be very handy if dealing with software that knows the tzdb names
but not POSIX notation.

			regards, tom lane