On 2018-01-24 18:36:42 (+0000), Stephen Colebourne wrote:
99.9999% of people (not being zic) should really be ignoring those files, and everything they contain (the remaining percentage are the people who maintain the data - all 10 or 20 or so of them in the world). Everything else should be based upon the zoneinfo output files from zic
This hasn't been true for many many years. The source files are parsed by every downstream program I know. Its been discussed before as to why this is. I'd strongly suggest accepting that the source files are a primary interface, which is why negative SAVE values matter to downstream users.
As for the rest, well I'm not going to reply to each line. With no acceptance of the concept of backwards compatibility, discussion is pretty pointless. If there was a simple bug fix that solves all the problems, I'd gladly do my part. There isn't such a fix - every avenue other than insisting on positive SAVE values will make things worse.
Want to make things truly better? Agree to move TZDB under the auspices of CLDR, so it can be managed by a paid team who actually understand stability and compatibility, and the trade off of those against some abstract notion of purity. As a combined dataset, there would be the ability to solve the text problem in a realistic and pragmatic way.
Wow. That's harsh.
TZDB is not the centre of the universe. It is a small cog in a much bigger machine. Its time to accept that.
Neither is Java the centre of the universe. Java is just one terribly broken downstream consumer with flawed expectations. But I don't think pointing fingers (at anyone) is going to make anything actually better. The tzdb could (and should) improve "expectation management" but downstram consumers could (and should) also improve their expectations from the data. As usual "be strict in what you send and liberal in what you accept" should be a guiding principle. The tzdb should be as correct as possible and downstream consumers should be (become) as flexible as possible to accept the crazy reality we happen to live in. Currently, historically and in the future. People in control of timezones *will* continue to mess with them in ways we don't expect. Negative savings have happened once. There is nothing to stop anyone from having a negative savings of twelve minutes relative to their "standard" timezone which happens to be called summer time... And software will just have to cope or people will get cranky. Philip -- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Ministry of Information