Deborah Goldsmith wrote:

It seems reasonable to me to release a TZ update as soon as there’s confirmation that the change is correct

Sometimes even after we have confirmation, a government changes its mind and un-confirms.

And in the more usual case where a government stands pat, there is an advantage to batching changes rather than generating a new tzdata release for each individual change. Doing the latter would have doubled the number of tzdata releases this year. There is a cost to making tzdata releases, and we shouldn't inflict that cost on everybody merely because some organizations' release processes are so slow that they'll have problems no matter what tzdata does.

The situation in Turkey is strange. It seems that the news was reported in a major Turkish newpaper on September 8. Only yesterday were we informed. As far as we know, there's been no government announcement. The last time Turkey tried this sort of thing, it didn't take: only parts of the government observed the official time, and civil society (e.g., airlines) ignored the change. It's not clear what will happen this time, even if we get confirmation from some agency of the Turkish government. Quite possibly Apple and the tzdata project will get complaints no matter what we do. Let the fingerpointing begin!