I envision something that only knows about the current time zones. There is no history.
This will reduce the number of zones considerably and enable the use of DateTime inside things that need to load all zones (eg mod_perl applicaitons)
The object should still record that it's in Australia/Melbourne, but it's the same object as the one referred to as Australia/Sydney in another place.
Once the object is stored or flattened or .. whatever, it can be reloaded into an object that uses the full TimeZone database and then it gets all historical info back.
I'm thinking here particularly of webmail applications that have users all 'round the world. History doesn't matter too much with such things. You rarely care about an email you got years ago being right to the hour.
Discuss.
Cheers! Rick
