On 12/6/21 05:43, John Hawkinson wrote:
Has anyone done any work on this, or given thought to it?
What I do is send email like the following to the commenter. It's not clear that it'd be helpful to put this into a text file somewhere in the distribution, as people would probably not see that anyway. ---- Thanks, we're aware of the renaming effort, and this has been a periodic source of discussion on the tz mailing list. I proposed a transition plan for Europe/Kiev → Europe/Kyiv here: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2020-November/029542.html and I suggest you review that email thread. There's no rush; tzdb tends to move slowly about these things, due to compatibility concerns. By the way, the choice of spelling should not be important to end users, as the tzdb spelling is not intended to be visible to them. End users should see their preferred spelling which would typically be Київ, but could also be Kyiv, Kænugarður, Κίεβο, 基輔, or whatever else is appropriate for the user's locale. The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a good source for these localized names; see <http://cldr.unicode.org/>. If your software application is exposing the string "Europe/Kiev" to users who prefer a different name, please send bug reports mentioning CLDR to the application's developers. Thanks.
Please note that the tz project does not use github PRs for issue tracking or commit management, so the PR will likely be closed in short order, which is not an indication of merit.
Quite right. I've closed the PR. Further discussion should be on the tz@iana.org mailing list.
Speaking of boilerplates, I want to again suggest that if this is going to continue to be the project policy, there should be a github pull-request template that makes it clear pull requests are not considered appropriate.
I tried to do that a while ago, but it didn't appear to take. I just looked again at this issue now; see its commentary on Dear GitHub <https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/84>. Disabling pull requests has been requested for five years, but GitHub hasn't implemented it yet. And all the workarounds have problems. For now, I will do the workaround that looks like it has the least number of problems, and this is what Linus Torvalds has done with the Linux kernel. That is, I will use GitHub's "Temporary interaction limits" to prevent all pull requests (and a bunch of other things, none of which we need) for the next six months. The idea is to reimpose this limit every six months, indefinitely. This should make it unnecessary to move the "please don't issue pull requests" message to the start of the CONTRIBUTING file.
the fact that the it's a plain text file (rather than CONTRIBUTING.md in markdown) makes it feel pretty unfriendly in the github world.
I tried changing CONTRIBUTING to CONTRIBUTING.md by installing the attached patches into <https://github.com/eggert/tz>, but I don't see how this has made the GitHub world that much friendlier. Could you explain? What GitHub URLs work better now than they did yesterday? On second thought, switching from text to Markdown might not be worth the trouble. Markdown has its problems (it's not portable enough, it's extremely limited, it confuses form with content) which means that changing CONTRIBUTING to CONTRIBUTING.md was perhaps a mistake. Of course we could always change it back....