[tz] Issues with pre-1970 information in TZDB

[Paul Eggert]

On 9/24/21 5:52 AM, Robert Elz wrote:
>  From a different message:
>    | If the rule were "at least one Zone  per political unit that has the legal
>    | power to set its own rules", we'd  have dozens more Zones than we do now,
>    | Zones that would cause more  trouble than they'd cure.
> 
> What trouble would that be?    I fail to see it.

I've tried to cover that topic in other emails but have no doubt missed 
some points. But here's another point: the set of political units with 
these powers have changed with time, so do we allow new Zones only 
political units with these powers since 1970? Or if we reject the other 
political units then what's our justification for that?

> If there is a request
> to add a zone for one of those, then simply add it.   All equitable and fair,
> and very very simple.

Unfortunately it would not work, for reasons I discussed a few minutes 
ago (not yet in the tzdb archive, but I hope you can find it).

>   | OK, how about if I scale back the current round of link-merging, so that
>   | it's on the scale of what we've done in previous releases?
> 
> That would depend upon what "scale back" means.   If it means "none of"
> that would be just fine.   If it means "all currently proposed, except Oslo"
> then no, that will not do at all.

It wouldn't be either. It would be on the scale that we've done in 
previous releases. Typically, we'd change about 10 Zones to Links (and 
move the resulting data to 'backzone' so it wouldn't get lost). This 
worked well in practice.