US/* was moved to 'backward' (the file for backward compatibility) in the tz database in 1993(!) and as such was essentially marked as deprecated long enough. https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/backward
You're telling me you didn't notice ? It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
In a large fraction of cases in the FOSS world, it comes across that the developers really do want to communicate this sort of thing, but there's no clarity on where or how they should do so. See for example various deprecations in Python packaging tools (and standards).
* https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tz-link.html#tzdb
* https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~eggert/tz/tz-link.htm#tzdb
Paul Eggert explained the continent/ocean plus largest city naming convention on a WWW page almost a quarter of a century ago. The WWW page was so well publicized that you can find its URL baked into at least four of the O'Reilly animal-cover books from the early 2000s.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20011023074744/http://www.twinsu...
It was explained on Usenet and on mailing lists prior to that.
An example of this falsehood? Well, in the 70s my father convinced most of my hometown, at least the portions between Main St and Wharf, that DST was absurd.
For almost an entire year, this was observed.
Do you think they kept record in tzdata? I tried to convince them, but no! I still have some dateplanners my father had printed up, and even a picture of the sign that was out on the road (to alert visitors!).
But no!
Do not trust the tzdata people. As you can see, they are not so accurate.
I frequently kick myself for losing track of that book.
> "The tz database is not authoritative, and it surely has errors. [...] Errors in the tz database arise from many sources: Sometimes, different people in the same city maintain clocks that differ significantly. [...] Even if the time is specified by law, locations sometimes deliberately flout the law. [...] Any attempt to pass the tz database off as the definition of time should be unacceptable to anybody who cares about the facts."
Nobody can really find fault with Asia/Jerusalem, whereas either Israel/Jerusalem or Palestine/Jerusalem would be controversial.
Continents are conventional are there are multiple competing conventions. The same place absolutely can and will move continents if you decide to swap out one of those conventions for another.
Or consider Cyprus-traditional geography assigns it to Asia-it may be an island, but that’s the nearest continental landmass-and so IANA tzdata lists it as Asia/Nicosia-but since it (or at least the internationally recognised part of it) is in the EU, a lot of people view it as part of Europe. And the standard name for its time zone is “Eastern European Time”