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. Considering the existence of this fork and the fact that the overwhelming majority of users are not affected by the merging of pre-1970 time zones, my plan is to merge the tzdata 2022a release into supported FreeBSD releases unmodified. I will create a port of your fork which affected/interested users can install, either using the ports framework or as a binary package. Depending on the direction of consensus among other operating system distributions, FreeBSD may change the default zoneinfo source at some point. Given that the most controversial changes in 2021b have been undone in 2021c, I don't see a pressing need to change to global-tz at this time.
The approach taken is to copy data from backzone and put it back into the main files. This recreates tzdb as it would have been had the damaging changes since 2014 not been made. The process is *automated*.
This is a good approach.
Downstream consumers should be able to take the generated source code (either from the global-tz branch or the released tar.gz file) and consume it as they would have consumed an iana-tz release. Joda-Time and threeTen-Backport will be using global-tz going forward.
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. Philip -- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Alternative Enterprises