Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
You should be OK then, as there are no plans to remove "make rearguard_tarballs" and I doubt whether it'll go away that quickly. Still, this shouldn't be an excuse for delaying for a year....
Thanks for the clarifications on this and help from yourself and others here. Regarding part of the original comment that I believe restarted all of this discussion...
We plan to get a new release out reasonably soon, and well before November. However, there is no fixed schedule or specific plan. In the meantime I suggest that you test your software by using the tzdb development version and reporting your results back. You can currently retrieve it by running this command:
git clone https://github.com/eggert/tz
I would like more testing by people other than myself. It's quite possible that the next release will have problems and I want to hear bug reports and "it's all OK!" reports back. I'm not hearing anything, which leads me to suspect that a new release must not be that urgent.
I've used the latest development version to build the rearguard format and test it. Yes rearguard given my prior comments of where our software currently stands, so perhaps that doesn't really count toward the testing efforts you were hoping for. We haven't encountered any issues with this and the changes appear fine to me. That being said, I will not claim to have 100% exhaustive test coverage for all the time zones in here. We have fairly comprehensive coverage for the time zones of relevance to us. Of the changes in the 'NEWS' section, Brazil would be the primary impact. I did some additional testing on Brazil specifically to make sure the date transitions appeared to be correct to us and they did. Just reporting my findings.