[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

[Russ Allbery]

dpatte via tz <tz at iana.org> writes:

> I certainly never sugested that. In fact quite the opposite. But I
> believe there should be AT LEAST one zone per iso country, and it was
> the removal of the Montreal historical data a few years back that got me
> started.

It's frustrating when people keep saying things like this given that no
data has been removed.  I am literally looking at it right now in the
GitHub repository.  It's right there.

It becomes hard to tell if people are genuinely confused about this, if
"removed" is shorthand for "my operating system stopped including that
zone," if "removed" means "I find it difficult to access now," or if it's
a rhetorical device to make the changes sound more severe and destructive
than they actually were to people who don't understand the true situation.
But it's simply not true as stated.

> Up until recently some of this data was available in the main tz
> file. We need that back, with the ability to expand and improve it.

I don't understand what you think is preventing you from expanding and
improving that data literally right now.  My understanding is that Paul
has said multiple times that if someone wants to do the thankless and
tedious reserach to find more accurate historical data with references,
patches will be reviewed and integrated.  Am I misremembering somehow?

I completely understand that you are not happy with the default build
choices or with the set of data that's shipped with major operating
systems, and I'm not saying that you have nothing to be unhappy about.
But I think it would lead to more constructive discussion if we could
describe the situation accurately and without exaggeration, and not claim
that data was deleted when it is still included in every release of
tzdata.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>