Stephen Colebourne wrote:
To be clear here, as the maintainer of the project, you are effectively asking some of its key consumers to fork the project. I find that pretty astonishing.
No, he's not asking you to fork the project, although I understand why it seems that way to you. Analogously, you're not trying to hijack the project, although I have to say it seems that way to me. As I understand it, the OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda projects are currently set up so that millions of Java end users are using the zic input files directly, without modification, and they're fetching the files directly from iana.org. That's a pretty constraining situation! And as long as things work that way, you're *never* going to be in favor of *any* change to the zic input file format, because you're never going to be able to assure yourself that all of those millions of users are going to upgrade their software any time soon. There have already been multiple incompatibilities (how does OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda deal with more than two time variants per year, by the way?), and there will certainly be more. So migrating to a strategy that could loosen the currently too-tight coupling between the projects would be to the benefit of all concerned, don't you think?