Re: UCT (Re: pgsql: Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2019a.)

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 8:18 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> As long as we have a trivial and obviously apolitical rule like
> alphabetical order, I think we can skate over such things; but the minute
> we have any sort of human choices involved there, we're going to be
> getting politically driven requests to do-it-like-this-because-I-think-
> the-default-should-be-that. Again, trawl the tzdb list archives for
> awhile if you think this might not be a problem:
> http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/

I'm kind of unsure what to think about this whole debate
substantively. If Andrew is correct that zone.tab or zone1970.tab is a
list of time zone names to be preferred over alternatives, then it
seems like we ought to prefer them. He remarks that we are preferring
"deprecated backward-compatibility aliases" and to the extent that
this is true, it seems like a bad thing. We can't claim to be
altogether here apolitical, because when those deprecated
backward-compatibility names are altogether removed, we are going to
remove them and they're going to stop working. If we know which ones
are likely to suffer that fate eventually, we ought to stop spitting
them out. It's no more political to de-prefer them when upstream does
than it is to remove them with the upstream does.

However, I don't know whether Andrew is right about those things.

--
Robert Haas
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