On 2016-09-01 13:08, John Hawkinson wrote:
I'd like to second Deborah Goldsmith's comments.
Change is hugely disruptive and the tz package is a core element of many critical systems. We don't have the luxury of making little changes, unlike some others packages. Ideally the current distribution format should last for centuries. Supplementing it is fine, but removing it should be off the table.
For a commercial example, the Oracle/Sun Java TZupdater tool documents at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-readme-136440.html that by default it assumes the latest data is available at http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tzdata-latest.tar.gz and I am sure I am not the only one with a script to check daily if the symlink destination changes, and download and apply the updates locally to systems with zoneinfo or Java, pending availability of officially updated releases, some of which may lag IANA releases by days, weeks, or months on some platforms. Many organizations have policies that only officially blessed vendor releases may be loaded and tested on systems.
On Aug. 8, Paul remarked that he expected an October release would be the first to incorporate the leap second changes for this December. That is 2 months; that is not a comfortable amount of time.
I suspect that right zoneinfo is not hugely important to the vast majority of tz users, but it is probably critical to those who do use it for their work, and updates will require work dealing with future times to be redone. Those who require it have to download the IERS file as soon as it is updated, regenerate the right data with every tz release, then rerun all their own dependent processes. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada