On 2019-11-24 16:13:57 (+1000), Garrett Wollman wrote:
On November 23, 2019 10:56:28 PM EST, Philip Paeps <philip@trouble.is> wrote:
I follow tzdata releases pretty closely and try not to diverge from upstream. Not installing backzone links predates my maintaining tzdata in FreeBSD.
I chose not to install the "backward" zones in the hope that this would more securely deprecate the then-recently-obsoleted old-style names like "US/Eastern", and then maybe they could be completely removed from the distribution if other downstream consumers (only a few operating systems at that point, no language runtimes) would do likewise.
Unfortunately, these ancient compatibility links never got deleted, so "backward" now contains a mix of ancient and more recent compatibility links, and users are still using them (or being told to use them by documentation that should have been updated decades ago).
Thanks for the context, Garrett. I have no strong opinion about whether to install the backzone links in FreeBSD or not. If the majority of other operating systems install them though, FreeBSD should probably do so as well. If we're currently the only ones not installing the backzone links ... that's just silly. :-) Philip -- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Alternative Enterprises