On 2022-12-07 03:37, Almaz Mingaleev via tz wrote:
Does that mean that libc APIs will behave differently from whatever is using ICU files?
No, as I understand it the idea is to allow automatic rebuilding of the timezone-related part of the CLDR/ICU data, whenever a new TZDB version is released, without having to wait for updates from CLDR/ICU. As I understand it, if TZDB releases version X, Android and Apple currently wait for ICU/CLDR to release a new version that takes X's changes into account. The idea is that we could improve on this by developing a procedure that, given a new TZDB release X and an older CLDR/ICU release W, would produce a slightly-modified copy W' of the CLDR/IDU data that takes X's changes into account, without having to wait for ICU/CLDR to produce a new version. Of course when ICU/CLDR get around to producing a new version X themselves, you could discard W'. The main obstacles I see to this are: * Copyright issues. Unicode, Inc. does not allow people to redistribute modified versions of their data files, even if the modifications are clearly needed. * Institutional inertia. ICU/CLDR is big and is unaccustomed to moving fast, and timezone info is not high priority for ICU/CLDR. Although we haven't so far seen any sign of interest here from the Unicode, Inc. side, perhaps they'll get around to it if some big customers ask them in the right way. By the way, what bad things would happen if Android and Apple *didn't* wait? In other projects I've dealt with, if an upstream program P adds a new timezone abbreviation "XYT", downstream distros like Ubuntu can immediately ship the new P without waiting for i18n updates. P will still work fine in all locales, except that the new "XYT" abbreviation (should it be needed) will appear as-is until translators catch up. Could Android and Apple do something similar with timezone-related strings?