On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

Andy Heninger wrote:

> Can I suggest that we split this into two updates, the first containing
> only the Fiji change

For convenience, if you'd like to have just the Fiji patch
(relative to 2013d) it's appended to this email.

As for redoing the patches and generating two updates,
sorry, I thought I'd covered this point earlier, but I
can't seem to find it in my outgoing mail, so I guess not.
Anyway, in the past we haven't bothered to split out changes
like that, and common practice has been for software
distributions to incorporate just the changes they want, if
they're leery about upgrading to a new release. For example,
Fedora 19 is using 2013c, but is incorporating post-2013c
patches for Morocco and Israel; see:

We try to have the time zone data in use be exactly the latest public tz data, identified by it's public name, 2013d or whatever. Patching is always possible, it's just cleaner and more convenient not to have to. The Fedora approach of patching the data but continuing to identify it as something that it is not can lead to real confusion.

In an ideal world, from my perspective, changes that affect the present or near future time would be kept separate from other changes, and have a fast-track release process. And perhaps substantial cleanup and historical data updates would be kept away from the busy times in March-April, and September-October, when all too many countries seem to think it's OK to announce that they changed their clocks last weekend.

Thanks,

-- Andy