Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
On 9/22/21 12:34 PM, Tom Lane via tz wrote:
1. It's not possible to separate the new backzone zones from the old.
No, actually it is possible. I've done it, by using the patch I described here: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030456.html
Of course I meant "tzdb, as currently constituted, provides no way to do that without an unreasonable amount of work, as well as needing intimate knowledge of the data set". Applying those patches would change that state of affairs. However ...
2. This approach puts it on individual tzdb distributors to decide which of these two options to choose.
Yes, that problem is inherent to any fork or option-equivalent-to-fork.
... I agree that this isn't a very desirable direction to go in, because we really don't want different distributors shipping different definitions of the same zone name. I suggested nearby [1] that this is fundamentally caused by misdesign of the backzone mechanism. I think a lot of the current angst is caused by the idea that we are (depending on build options) shipping zone definitions that are known to not be the best available data. That's bad both intrinsically and because it means different platforms might define the same zone name differently. But it would be very simple to just not do that. regards, tom lane [1] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030632.html