On 11 February 2018 at 22:29, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
Stephen Colebourne wrote:
you are effectively asking some of its key consumers to fork the project. I find that pretty astonishing.
I would find it astonishing too, if that was what was being suggested. But it's not. I'm merely suggesting standard practice that is commonly done by other tzdb consumers. For example, you can see it in action here:
These are groups/teams for whom packaging/repackaging is their normal role. Its not comparable. In addition, every user of these libraries has gone to IANA for the files for over 15 years - they understand IANA to be the source of timezone data. Breaking that is undesirable.
there is absolutely no good rationale for making this change
Although there is good rationale for the change, you clearly disagree.
The only visible change for zic is a flag that is deprecated/discouraged. So why not change zic or the tooling to alter the flag in the case of Ireland? Its very ego-centric of the project to put the importance of that flag ahead of all other consumers. We have had an agreement for many years that the zic input files represent an API used by other systems, and is therefore protected for compatibility as an API. While everyone accepts that the importance of positive SAVE values was not previously established, it clearly is now. So, it should simply be declared as part of the API. Note that I've never precluded the tzdb distribution containing other/additional files with other/additional information, just the protection of the input source files. Stephen