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

[Stephen Colebourne]

I examined the changes this makes using my tzdiff tool:
https://github.com/jodastephen/tzdiff/commit/bbeef1aae8797ecdf28202b751fdd01760a48e16

To me, this seems like an awful change.

As can be seen in the link, many places (eg Anguilla, Antigua and
Aruba) are now sharing time-zone history, and that history is **from
some other zone**. That seems completely unacceptable.

While I understand the motivation to remove the burden of pre-1970,
that cannot come at the cost of giving a place the history of
somewhere completely different.

I ask that this change is completely reverted.

Stephen



On Thu, 27 May 2021 at 03:00, Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>
> On 5/22/21 11:17 AM, Tim Parenti wrote:
>
> > I'm inclined to agree here.  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:
>
> Yes, it appears that I may have gone a bit too far in consolidating
> Etc/* names with other names. I undid that part of the change by
> installing the attached followup patch (first patch).