On 9/23/21 9:00 PM, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
My chief concern is instability and incompatibility
2021a1 will give you maximum stability and compatibility with 2021a, so you can use that if equity is not as much of a concern for you.
why is it so very, very important to make this change right now
The equity issue has been on the table for months, no other approach has been developed or tested, and the only other approaches proposed would be less stable and compatible than the already built-and-tested 2021b would be. The equity issue was raised early this year, and we've delayed dealing with it for far too long already. Equity is a real issue of concern, and it's a bad look for us if we continue with a clearly-inequitable primary distribution when a fairer approach has long been implemented and available and nothing else is available. This is mostly a disagreement about maintenance philosophy not end-user functionality, as the pre-1970 differences between 2021a1 and 2021b will be minor when considered from end users' point of view. We know this because we've made similar changes many times in previous releases. I'll be happy to collaborate on building something that will accommodate our philosophical differences in later releases, and have already proposed specific (though not-yet-installed) working code that goes a long way toward doing that. Having had some experience with writing and testing that code, I have confidence that this technical approach will succeed if the community wants to work together on this. Of course there will be issues - among other things, the at-least-one-Zone-per-country-code philosophy is even more unstable/incompatible than 2021b will be - but they're clearly solvable.