Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
On 9/21/21 7:08 AM, Tom Lane via tz wrote:
if any significant number of vendors start including backzone to restore some approximation of the way things stood before, then there is going to be the same mess from end users' standpoint as a true fork would produce.
True, and a good reason to not make use of the draft patches that I emailed earlier today in <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030456.html>.
Yeah, I was about to reply to that along similar lines: I think we should put some value on most people using the same version of tzdb, so adding options to pick-and-choose subsets of the data is arguably counterproductive.
There's another good reason to not use that approach, noted in the bias2021a.bp file in that email:
# This file should be not be used in production by organizations # committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion because it restores # the previous tzdb setup, which arguably exhibited racial or national # preferences.
TBH, I find that argument to have just about zero merit. It's not like the previous state of affairs was deliberately non-diverse, nor do I believe that the May patches magically removed all potential complaints of that sort. I think the way to proceed here is what has been suggested by several people including me: revert to the pre-May set of zone data, and make a commitment that we'll accept properly-researched patches to add per-country zones over time. (This need not be a commitment that the TZ Coordinator would do such research.) I think the reason that e.g. Norway has its own zone is that somebody did the research to add it once upon a time. Why should we devalue that effort now? regards, tom lane