For Android having 2021a1 and 2021b would be inconvenient. Because there are hardcoded places which expect that tzdata version is exactly 5 characters. And we can't update that code along with time zone files. Most feasible way we see is to release it as "2021a Android revision 1", but that revision field is not exposed by any APIs. There will be inconsistencies between different APIs on "What tzdb release are you using". Personally I agree with Tom. Releasing 2021b as 2021a + Samoa changes is less disruptive. On Wed, 22 Sept 2021 at 19:31, Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
In light of the previous discussions and the fact that we need a new release very soon, I propose the following:
* We release 2021b pretty much as-is (with the usual release administrivia such as updating NEWS).
* We also generate a separate 2021a1 version, which is like 2021a except with the Samoa change that is prompting 2021b. This version recognizes the concerns about the number of changes to pre-1970 timestamps in 2021b. I'll do this by publishing a patch to 2021a, along with a patched tarball, on my website at UCLA.
Although this is effectively a fork in the short term, the idea is that it's a small fork with the intent that we'll work together to combine the two approaches in later releases, taking the abovementioned concerns into account.
There is precedent for this approach, in that when there were compatibility problems with earlier releases, I generated alternate tarballs to support downstream users while they were adapting their database readers. Although the two cases are not the same, generating an alternate distribution also has the benefit of giving us time.
Although I haven't had time to read all the discussions so far (and email is still rolling in), I will try to take these discussions into account when writing the NEWS entries for the two versions.
After the versions are published and the dust has settled, I hope that we can incorporate some of the suggestions that have been made, as we will then have time to implement and test them. I don't want this followup discussion to take a looong time, though, as the goal is to combine the two approaches soon.
Since Samoa's rules change in less than 72 hours I plan to generate these new versions soon.