Barry Allard wrote:
Has the format changed somehow? If this and future database files were to break backwards-compatibility arbitrarily...
The format of the tzdata files themselves is, I think, sacrosanct. There are no compatibility issues there. The recently-discussed issues all have to do with packaging and distribution, which affects system integrators and people who repackage and redistribute the data. As far as I know it does not affect the end systems at all. Also, I get the impression -- though I am not an expert on the issues -- that most of the recent compatibility issues have involved repackagers and redistributors who had, unbeknownst to the core tz maintainers, become dependent on accidental aspects of the core distribution which were not part of the defined interface. There was no reason to suspect that making an essentially inside-the-black-box change to the implementation would end up breaking someone's downstream repackaging mechanism, until the reports came back that they had. It's true, though, that once a resource has become as widespread and indispensable as the tz database is, there's a fine line to be walked between an appropriate level of conservatism so as not to perturb downstream consumers, versus not making any improvements at all.