On 2023-10-11 13:27, Doug Ewell via tz wrote:
Fabrício Rennó wrote:
I think I made my idea clear about the need of a lighter approach.
*Your desire* for a lighter approach.
On my long list of things to do is coming up with a table that would let users do that more easily. It would be like tzdb's current zone1970.tab, which partitions the world into zones where clocks have agreed since 1970; however, it would partition the world into a smaller set of larger zones whose clocks agree now and are predicted to agree in the future. This would be something along thne lines as you suggested, as people in Brazil would have just four zones to chose from in this new table. I hope the future reviews on this can create simplified structures for us all. For *some* with very simple and less stringent requirements; others including astrologers, astronomers, historians, physicists, space mission planners, travel industries, and international systems and software developers and engineers, may all have more stringent requirements than your limited local desires.
It would be the same as telling you that your design programs need only data for the most common forms and sizes of common structural materials: standard concrete, steels, and some woods, beams and columns, and nothing more; or maybe as it is so limited, that you could do all your design with only those materials, using only a spreadsheet of constants, one of conversion factors, another of dimensions, a couple for working calculations, and that's all you get.
To be clear, any “lighter approach” or “simplified structures” will most likely take the form of an additional file, as Paul described below. It will almost certainly not involve removing any timezones (or “tzdb regions”) from the database. What is deployed will depend greatly on the downstream user community and distro or downstream package maintainers. For maximal compatibility and usefulness for all, many will keep all history available, possibly in rearguard format, as with Oracle Java, unless they have deprecated or dropped their old structures, and moved to newer libraries.
-- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada La perfection est atteinte Perfection is achieved non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter not when there is no more to add mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer but when there is no more to cut -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry