<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Perhaps current timekeeping does need it, but historical time based research does, and that is our point.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div id="composer_signature" dir="auto"><div style="font-size:85%;color:#575757" dir="auto">Sent from my Galaxy</div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div><br></div><div align="left" dir="auto" style="font-size:100%;color:#000000"><div>-------- Original message --------</div><div>From: Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> </div><div>Date: 2021-09-21 17:13 (GMT-05:00) </div><div>To: Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne@joda.org> </div><div>Cc: Time Zone Mailing List <tz@iana.org> </div><div>Subject: Re: [tz] </div><div><br></div></div>On 9/21/21 1:20 PM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:<br><br>> Straw man. Literally no one has suggested this.<br><br>Yes, of course it's a straw argument. That's the point.<br><br>Although it'd be technically possible to require a Zone for each state <br>and province in the world, it's not necessary, it would consume <br>maintenance resources that are better spent elsewhere, and Zone <br>proliferation would make things unnecessarily complicated for users. The <br>situation for countries is similar. Admittedly there are few countries <br>than states+provinces, but logically there's no difference between the <br>two cases.<br><br>> If you don't like ISO countries as the basis of a rule, feel free to<br>> suggest something else.<br><br>My suggestion is to stick with the rules already in theory.html. They've <br>worked well over the years.<br>> If you want to resolve the issue you need a rule that doesn't end up<br>> with users in Norway or Sweden requesting the time-zone for 1950 and<br>> getting the zone information of Germany instead.<br><br>If that's the idea, then I also need a rule that doesn't end up with <br>users in Munich requesting the time zone for September 20, 1945 and <br>getting the UTC offset of Berlin instead. The case for a Munich Zone is <br>even stronger than the case for an Oslo Zone, as Munich has a lot more <br>people (and more tzdb users) than Oslo does.<br><br>Of course this is a straw argument too; that's the point. All this stuff <br>about pre-1970 timestamps is out of scope for tzdb proper, and it's <br>always been out of scope.<br><br>Only politics would require us to have a Zone for every ISO country. <br>Timekeeping needs don't require it. Admittedly we used to have more <br>Zones, but we've never had a Zone for every ISO country and no <br>timekeeping need for such a rule has ever been demonstrated.<br></body></html>