On 2025-07-01 15:54, Justin Grant via tz wrote:
Is there any downside (other than the work required to patch it) to putting this ID into `backward`?
Yes, it's not what "backzone" was intended for, and continuing down this path will lead to further grief in the future.
The original intent of "backzone" was to contain additional data, not part of the main database, with the idea that the file could grow in the future and be maintained in a less centralized way. However, nobody stepped up to add to or maintain "backzone", and in practice it has turned into something different: it is now primarily a way of supporting two versions of tzdb, the default one (which attempts to avoid politics as much as possible) and the backzone one (which instead attempts to avoid changes from older versions of the database).
The right way to move forward here is to decouple the two ideas of having extra data vs having old data. Trying to merge the ideas into one file is a recipe for complication, confusion and more political disputes in the future. We should avoid that, as political disputes are the greatest hazard this volunteer project faces.
