I've carefully followed the debate so far, and while I do believe there should be some change in the tzdb development process and the offending patch should be

I've carefully followed the debate so far, and while I do believe there should be some change in the tzdb development process and the offending patch should be reverted for now, I ultimately disagree with Stephen Colebourne. In fact I found Colebourne more misleading than Paul Eggert, the current tzdb coordinator. There has been two major ways to use the Timezone Database other than using the bundled tzcode. One is to use the compiled TZif file (intended to be used by tzcode, but also standardized in RFC 8536). Another is to use the textual format that is compiled to TZif via zic. The latter option was never intentional but used by a significant number of downstream projects including Joda-Time. And every time the textual format slightly changes, Colebourne complains about the breakage despite that breakage was induced by Joda-Time itself. And it has also caused a significant maintenance burden to the tzdb: most notably rearguard/vanguard splits [1]. This time Colebourne is complaining not because pre-1970 timestamps will be altered---they have changed a lot in the past---but because Joda-Time was falsely assuming that the zone never turns into an alias. Therefore Colebourne should have requested more concrete and reasonable guarantees for the tzdb. Instead he is claiming Joda-Time is representative of downstream projects and the tzdb should follow what Joda-Time is assuming. This annoying attitude is evident when you also look at Mark Davis (who is in charge of CLDR); while Davis agrees that the patch should be reverted (reasonably so) he is much more careful about his wording. Technically speaking it has been true since 2014 that any time zones that looked alike before 2014 can be merged. The only difference is that, multiple such time zones across multiple countries were not merged yet at that time. That's what Eggert refers to the equity or fairness principle, but personally I came to think that he is actually giving marginal and tangential reasons to implicitly express the disdain about Colebourne. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24587730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24587730