On 2024-04-05 04:42, Benjamin Drung via tz wrote:
Switching to TZDB's zic would be an option for the development release of Ubuntu, but not for the stable releases: We ship tzdata.zi in /usr/share/zoneinfo and we do not know if users rely on being able to use zic from glibc on that file.
Makes sense.
Come to think of it, glibc should do that too. I'll add that to my list of things to do.
That would be great.
I committed that change to the glibc master repository and it should appear in the next glibc release. See <https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=1f94147a79fcb7211f1421b87...>.
Attached the new version of the patch to avoid adding a new data format.
That patch would be problematic, as main.zi should reflect what's in the main files. That is, "cat africa antarctica ..." should output a copy of main.zi. Let's take a step back for a minute. Today I read the bug report <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/+bug/2003797> that caused Ubuntu to start using PACKRATLIST=zone.tab recently. This bug report doesn't mention user requests; instead, it seems to have been prompted by your impression that some Ubuntu users might be bothered by tzdata 2022b's changes to pre-1970 Europe/Oslo. As you can guess, I doubt whether Ubuntu users care much about pre-1970 computer-generated timestamps in Norway. If I'm wrong and some users do care, Ubuntu could instead move the packrat stuff to its tzdata-legacy package, or to a new tzdata-packrat package that contains the packrat info. This would simplify maintenance of main tzdata package, and would lessen the number of trivial differences between default Ubuntu and elsewhere. Even if for some reason it's necessary to keep backzone's Europe/Oslo in Ubuntu's tzdata package, that doesn't mean Ubuntu tzdata needs all of backzone's entries. Instead, it could keep just the backzone entries that Ubuntu users actually need, and omit troublemaking entries like Africa/Asmara where the data are low quality and are surely wrong anyway (does anybody really think that the inhabitants of Asmara adjusted their clocks by 12 seconds on January 1, 1890 at midnight? I don't). Ubuntu could do that by creating a file packrat-ubuntu.tab containing lines like this: NO +5955+01045 Europe/Oslo i.e., just the subset of zone.tab that refers to backzone entries containing high-quality pre-1970 data that users actually need, and then building with: make PACKRATDATA=backzone PACKRATLIST=packrat-ubuntu.tab Surely, though, it would be simpler and more reliable to eliminate the packrat stuff from the tzdata package, possibly moving it to tzdata-legacy or to a new tzdata-packrat package.