On Thu, 2022-12-08 at 12:50 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
In the past I've gotten my Ubuntu systems updated within 24 hours of a tzdata release, simply by applying patches as usual from Ubuntu. But as Benjamin indicates, this is not happening with 2022g. I just now checked for updates and I'm still stuck on 2022f. So from my point of view, Ubuntu is slow in this case - instead of taking less than a day, it's taking more than a week.
Ubuntu has as stable release update (SRU) process [1]. The process includes letting the update age in -proposed for at least seven days. That hasn't changed since the beginning in 2006. So I wonder how you get the updates within 24 hours. Feel free to start a discussion with the SRU team to reduce the ageing time for tzdata updates that are urgent. The technical minimum would be a few hours (for the package build and to run all autopkgtest). Side note: Ubuntu uses phased updates which means that updates reach the users step by step. The tzdata updates are copied to -security [2] and therefore all users should get them without phasing. The update for 2022g is tracked in bug #1998321 [3]. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#tzdata [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/+bug/1998321
being consistently wrong about _new_ changes is better than having different answers within the platform.
As a Ubuntu user, I'd prefer tzdata to be up-to-date even though ICU is out-of-date, over having both tzdata and ICU out-of-date. Of course Ubuntu differs from Android in that most apps use tzdata not ICU. Still, I'm a bit curious what end-user-visible problems would occur on Android and/or Ubuntu if tzdata leads ICU slightly. I know you've seen problems, but were they end-user problems or just test-case problems? On Ubuntu various other copies of tzdata (e.g., Python's) can be slightly out of date too, but this doesn't seem to be much of an issue.
There should be no copies of tzdata in Ubuntu. All software packages should only rely on tzdata. Please let me know if you find any. The only problematic package that I know is python3-tz which includes a hard coded list of time zone names [4]. Python uses the data from the tzdata package. [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-tz/+bug/207604
It is not translations that we are waiting for, but changes like [1 <https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/pull/2261/files>]. Recent time zone changes were short notice ones and ICU team (thanks Yoshito and others!) did these changes very quickly.
Thanks, I didn't know that.
Here's a timeline I see for the latest Mexico change:
Let me enhance that timeline.
* 2022-11-28 17:00 UTC - news article published announcing the change (which is not official yet, I think) <http://puentelibre.mx/noticia/ciudad_juarez_cambio_horario_noviembre_2022/>
* 2022-11-29 03:55:31 UTC - tz mailing list notified <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-November/032365.html>
* 2022-11-29 17:42:29 UTC (14 hours after notification) - tzdb 2022g announced <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2022-November/000076.html>
* 2022-11-29 18:23:41 UTC (less than an hour after tzdb 2022g announcement) tzdata 2022g-r0 released for Alpine Linux <https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86/tzdata>
* 2022-11-30 07:06 UTC (7 hours after tzdb 2022g announcement) - tzdata 2022g-1 released for Arch Linux <https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/tzdata/>
* 2022-11-30 10:21 UTC - Ubuntu tzdata update ticket created https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/+bug/1998321 * 2022-11-30 13:42 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu1 uploaded to Ubuntu 23.04 (lunar) * 2022-11-30 14:46 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu0.22.10.0 uploaded to Ubuntu 22.10 (kinetic-proposed) * 2022-11-30 16:35 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu0.22.04.0 uploaded to Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy-proposed) * 2022-11-30 17:58 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu0.20.04.0 uploaded to Ubuntu 20.04 (focal-proposed) * 2022-11-30 19:08 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu0.18.04 uploaded to Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic-proposed)
* 2022-12-01 03:08:08 UTC (33 hours after tzdb 2022g announcement) - abovementioned ICU patch committed
* 2022-12-01 12:30 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu2 with ICU update uploaded to Ubuntu 23.04 (lunar)
* 2022-12-01 12:38:06 UTC (9 hours after ICU patch committed) - Ubuntu patch committed <https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/2022g-0ubuntu0.22.10.1>
* 2022-12-01 12:50 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu0.22.04.1 with ICU update uploaded to Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy-proposed) * 2022-12-01 12:54 UTC - tzdata 2022g-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 with ICU update uploaded to Ubuntu 20.04 (focal-proposed)
* 2022-12-05 (4 days after ICU patch committed) - Red Hat Enterprise Linux fix available to users <https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2022:8785>
* 2022-12-07 (6 days after ICU patch committed) - Android patch committed <https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/timezone/+/ea3e0ece71974c1d...>
* now (a week after ICU patch committed) - my Ubuntu workstation is still not updated.
We should be able to do better than this; that is, be more like Alpine or Arch Linux, or at least more like RHEL (though I see that Fedora still hasn't released 2022g...). Though ICU is part of the problem (as is tzdb itself :-), most of the delay seems to be occurring even after ICU patches are applied.
-- Benjamin Drung Debian & Ubuntu Developer