On Fri 2015-07-10T10:24:49 -0700, Paul Eggert hath writ:
Also, there's overhead to making a release. Even when data can be 99.999% verified there is still benefit to having ten releases a year instead of fifty, if ten will do.
Downstream users of the tz database need to be reasonably prompt in applying new releases anyway. Governments sometimes decide changes only a few days before they take effect, so if users care about timestamps, OS release schedules simply cannot require three-month delays. This is true regardless of whether we issue a new Uruguayan-related tz release this week or next week.
I think we should expect that these economics and timing of timezone information authority, packaging, and distribution will change if the Time Zone Data Distribution Service (tzdist) becomes a widely implemented standard. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/tzdist/documents/ Changing the distribution of the information from OS updates to on-demand web service may mean that the IANA efforts of this mail list, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. will all have to decide how they want to fit into that new model of "publishers" and "providers". This current discussion about Uruguay seems to be leading toward that process. -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m