I've been trying to work out when and how to chime in, but I think Stephen's post is closest to my view.

As far as I can tell, Noda Time will technically work. ZonedDateTime.IsDaylightSavingTime() method will return true for the winter and false for the summer (from whenever this takes effect, of course - I haven't checked). That will surprise developers who aren't aware of this change, and won't surprise developers who are aware of this change. I don't think I know a better solution though.

At a very, very simplistic level, I'd say it's worth weighing up the pros and cons:

Option 1: Keep the change
Pros:
- "Technically correct" (maybe - I'll assume it is for the sake of this discussion)
- Doesn't revert anything

Cons:
- Breaks a lot of code right now


Option 2: Defer the change
Pros:
- Existing software keeps working as expected by most users and developers

Cons:
- "Technical correctness" is delayed
- Anything which was changed to support 2018a with a bad Irish-specific fix may get confused again
- We'll never really know when it's safe to apply the change


Option 3: Revert the change forever, possibly formalizing this
Pros:
- Existing software keeps working as expected by most users and developers

Cons:
- At odds with technical correctness

For me the "keeping working as expected by most users and developers" is the most important part... even if developers fix software to "work" and display things according to Irish legislation, my guess is that it will confuse a lot of real users.

Basically, I value "practical correctness" much, much, much higher than "technical correctness" here - I would far prefer the Irish legislation to change in order to get technical correctness...

Jon


On 19 January 2018 at 08:44, Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne@joda.org> wrote:
Thanks for the revert, however I disagree that it is an appropriate
change to make in general.

The IANA charter of TZDB says:
"To be clear, the TZ Coordinator SHALL NOT set time zone policy for a
region but use judgment and whatever available sources exist to assess
what the average person on street would think the time actually is, or
in case of historical corrections, was."
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6557

I do not believe that the "average man on the street" in Ireland
thinks their clocks go back in winter, I think they believe their
clocks go forward in summer. More specifically, the project is about
de facto time as perceived by the masses, not what the legal documents
say.

Stephen


On 19 January 2018 at 08:14, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Philip Paeps wrote:
>>
>> Given the number of things this break, I would suggest backing the change
>> out for now but pointing out in NEWS that it will come back say one year
>> from now.
>>
>> Replace the actual change by a comment that the current data is inaccurate
>> pending software being fixed.
>
>
> Thanks, this sounds like a good way to go. Proposed patch attached, and
> installed into the development version on GitHub. Presumably there should be
> a 2018c release quite soon, to get this temporary workaround out the door.
> (2018b has been prepared and published but not announced, since the problems
> with ICU and OpenJDK became apparent during the post-publication process.)
>
> There is a conflict between the goals of "let's not break anything" and
> "let's match civil timekeeping practice". I lean towards doing the latter as
> long as it doesn't cause too much trouble for the former. Here it seems like
> there is some trouble with ICU and OpenJDK, so delay seems advisable until
> fixes can be prepared. That being said, I don't want to wait indefinitely
> for these fixes. This is not a tzdb-specific issue, since POSIX requires
> support for negative DST (e.g., TZ='IST-1GMT0,M10.5.0,M3.5.0/1' for current
> Irish rules), which means that applications that reject negative DST are not
> portable to standard platforms configured for Irish time.
>
> The proposed patch continues to use the "IST is standard time" approach for
> Irish timestamps between October 1968 and October 1971, but I assume that's
> OK since that's what we did before.