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."