From: Meno Hochschild <mhochschild@gmx.de> Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 05:49:44 +0100 Subject: Re: [tz] [english 100%] Re: [english 100%] Re: OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Irelandchange | An illustrating example: If the rule line contains an optional | meta-column at the end whose content is a key-value-structure | (comma-separated in case of several entries for any other purpose) then | the Eire-rules might look like this: Before we spend too much time on this, and considering that we have (well CLDR has) meta-zones, and you're proposing a meta-column, I have a meta-question ... Why do we need all this? That is, what end-user real applications actually use any of this data, what do they use it for, and what do they really need (or want) ? Now I know why (I suspect) all of us here need it - we need it because we have to comply with the POSIX APIs, and for historic reasons coming from 1970's vintage (US centric) unix, those APIs have time zone abbreviations, and tm_isdst, and stuff like that. So, the tzdb project has to provide the data that POSIX demands that applications be able to use. Simililarly, tzdb is all English (to which the "english 100%" which appears multiple times in the Subject of these messages refers) and that's not acceptable to international users, so CLDR provides the information in languages, and character sets, that are more suitable to people in places where "English 100%" is more like "English 1%"... All that is understandable, there is a need, and we happen to be the groups that fill that need. Given that, it can sometimes be hard to even contemplate, let alone accept, that all of this hard work, which we must perform, might simply be wasted, and of no real interest to anyone or anything important. So before we waste a lot more time designing fixes to this problem (which would mean enhancing CLDR to allow more than 2 non-generic names for a timezone, and all their users to fix their code to handle that) can we find out whether there is any point to all of this. There are two answers that are not interesting... 1) our test suite tests it, so we need to make it work before we can release new versions... (the test suite can be altered.) 2) we display this in our UI. Why? Because it is available. If you stopped displaying it, would it matter? Users would notice the difference and complain. Would it actually affect how your application works, or how the users use it? Not really, no. If (2) there ends with a "yes" answer, then exactly how the data is used, what its needed for, and what would break without it (this is assuming it is all working perfectly, ignore what happens if things change and cause errors, for now anyway) is what would be useful to know. Maybe it will turn out that all of this really is important (to at least some class of end users and the apps they use) in which case we need to go ahead and find solutions to the problems that are known to exist now. I don't think I have ever seen one. Ever. But of course, I don't have experience with *everything* that exists (nor even most of it) so I might just have missed something, somewhere. But if not, a better solution would be to get posix to simply (even more) deprecate all the old trash, so we don't have to provide it, and all of us can go back to doing work that actually provides a useful service rather than wasting lots of time looking for solutions to problems that no-one really cares about. kre