On Mon, 21 Mar 2022 at 04:57, Philip Paeps <philip@trouble.is> wrote:
On 2022-03-19 00:00:54 (+0800), Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
As regular readers of this list will be aware, there is a long-running dispute about the contents of the IANA time-zone database. (See the list history for details on the dispute).
I have strongly mixed feelings about this fork but I appreciate your efforts in trying to resolve the deadlocked dispute. Thank you.
No problems. From my perspective having done this work, it is obvious to me that it would be a lot simpler if the auto-generation was in the other direction. ie. if the main TZDB source files contained all the relevant data (ie. what global-tz has done), and an automated job stripped it down to the minimal data set that the tz-corrdinator desires.
I don't see a pressing need to change to global-tz at this time.
I think we are currently at an unstable equilibrium. The contents of IANA TZDB discriminate against non-European locations, because there are essentially two different rules in operation as to what data is included. global-tz represents one way to solve that issue, by consistently applying one rule globally. The question distributors will need to answer is what they want to do once European pre-1970 history is removed from zones that are merged (as distributors are tacitly accepting the discrimmination of the current unstable equilibrium).
The generated global-tz/tzdata omits the zone1970.tab file. I understand that your intended use case has no need for this file but if you distribute it, your tzdata tarball would be a drop-in replacement for the IANA tzdata tarball.
Hmm. I hadn't intended for the file to be missing from the tar.gz. I only mentioned it in the automated job as it causes "make check" to fail. (PRs welcome!) thanks Stephen