[tz] timezone Verschlimmbesserung

Steffen Nurpmeso steffen at sdaoden.eu
Mon Oct 4 19:59:09 UTC 2021


Alois Treindl wrote in
 <60e82e0d-cf77-62b1-0bac-0bf5d5cc86f8 at astro.ch>:
 |On 29.09.21 18:53, Paul Eggert via tz wrote:
 |> On 9/29/21 4:20 AM, Tony Finch via tz wrote:
 |>> The aim of merging timezones was to avoid political issues and to reduce
 |>> the maintenance burden. It seems to me that it has failed to achieve 
 |>> those
 |>> goals.
 |>
 |> That being said, pre-1970 timestamps are an area where the long-term 
 |> maintenance burden is very real and the*overall end-user benefit is 
 |> exceedingly tiny, even negative. *

 |I absolutely disagree with the claim that end-user benefit of pre-1970 
 |data is exceedingly tiny.
 |
 |*pre-1970 time data are extremely important for hundreds of authors and 
 |millions of users of astrological software.*
 |
 |Whatever one may think of astrology, it is a fact that at was 
 |astrologers like Thomas Shanks and others who collected extensive
 |historical time zone data, pre- and post-1970.
 |
 |TZ database would not be what it is without contributions and ongoing 
 |effort by the "astrological community".
 |
 |I fully support Thomas Finch's proposal:
 |
 |> I think the way to fix this is to revert both policy changes, and revert
 |> all the timezone merges.

I also think data should be reunited.
(It would surely be doable to use tooling to automatically unite
all zones which are identical post-1970, maybe give that an
auto-generated name, and make all actual TZIDs which point to that
data links automatically.)

What really bugs me with the current post-1970-matters rule is
that the "ZFLAGS='-r @0'" option is neither default nor
prominently documented.
In conjunction with the zone moving pre-1970 dates may point to
wrong zones, instead "of only being wrong" (which they may well be
anyway).

Also that tzselect(8) gives the name of the actually really used
zone instead of the name that was used is ugly, as could be seen
by asking for Europe/Copenhagen and getting "using Europe/Berlin".
As TZIDs are stable it should not matter what the actual name of
the dataset is, only the TZID is of interest.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)


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