Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne@joda.org> writes:
Secondly, I'm not speaking on behalf of myself, but on behalf of Java development generally.
That's quite a mantle for you to be assuming for yourself. I have to say that I would be very reluctant to make a similar claim. I'm not sure I'd want to be responsible for expressing the opinions of the entire Java development community as a self-appointed spokesperson.
Thirdly, I note that the leading supporters of Paul's approach are from an academic background (Paul, Guy, yourself). With respect, I wonder if that academic background insulates from the needs of enterprise software, primarily stability.
I'm not that horribly interested in a war of credentials, but perhaps some additional professional background would be helpful for context. I am, professionally, an IT architect and software developer for the central IT department at Stanford University. I'm not sure whether you count that as an academic background or not, but my day job is running a large hetergeneous server infrastructure. My professional specialty is authentication systems, which tend to care very deeply about accurate time, but my involvement in this mailing list is out of personal interest and curiosity. I am also a member of the Debian Technical Committee and one of the editors of the Debian Policy documentation, so I'm reasonably familiar with distribution packaging issues, although I am not personally involved in the Debian packaging of the tz database or in time zone selection during the Debian installation process. That said, I want to make it clear that I don't speak for Debian, let alone for Linux packagers in general. I'm participating, as I hope all of us are, as an individual with some interest in helping the project make the best decisions that we can make, and to provide support to Paul as the primary maintainer.
Fourthly, it seems to me that the recent batch of changes are far in excess of what has happened over previous years. For example, https://github.com/eggert/tz/commits/master/backward shows that the backward file was modified a number of times in the past few years, but almost always for changes to the spelling or naming of zone IDs (something which I've not opposed, even though I know CLDR finds that problematic).
I think it's important to distinguish between two different things that are happening. There have been quite a few changes made recently on a trial basis in an attempt to address some of the geopolitical concerns. I have no specific comments on that other than to say that I wholeheartedly approve of and support the *process* that Paul has been using in trying to reach consensus on how to address those problems, including floating trials and then backing them out when people disagree with them. I'm personally frustrated by people treating every proposed change as if the world might end; by all means, argue your side of this debate if you have strong opinions, but some of the comments have bordered on accusing Paul of acting in bad faith, and that's not sitting well with me. I have my own opinions about the origin of the recent flood of geopolitical concerns (and they're much harsher than Paul's, which is one of the reasons why I've been sitting on my hands and letting Paul handle it, much better than I would have). But I think it's important to remember that Paul is making a good-faith effort to address issues that have been raised, and to act and debate accordingly. However, apart from that set of changes, from where I sit, you and a small number of other people have gone beyond that argument and have now started objecting to nearly every change Paul makes for any reason, including changes that would have been entirely uncontroversial in previous years. And that's what I'm taking exception to.
Finally, I'm NOT asking for all historical data to be frozen. I'm asking for no historical data to be changed UNLESS the replacement is a clear enhancement.
The bar that you're setting for "clear enhancement" is not consistent with how this project has ever been run in the past.
In summary, given the importance of the data set, and how it is currently being abused, I have no choice but to pusue my objections.
You are bringing far too much drama to this situation, in my opinion. Paul has demonstrated repeatedly that he's not only open to reasonable discussion, he's open to reverting changes even when people aren't able to express coherent objections but are just upset. None of this is the end of the world. There are some very hard problems around the intersection of geopolitics and time zone selection, but there are also multiple layers of correction and UI between the core database and those issues. And the changes that people are worried about have not been in any official release. I understand why you want there to be a single tz database run according to your criteria, but that isn't an option on the table. There can be multiple tz databases, of which one is run according to your criteria, or there can be one database where you provide only one point of input among many other people. The contributions you have brought are very valuable. It is very useful to have someone deeply involved in the project who understands and cares about Java's use of the database, particularly since some of those uses are quite different than the typical POSIX use of the database (which was its original raison d'etre and still tends to shine through, although the project has grown beyond that). I would certainly prefer for you to continue to collaborate here. But from where I sit, the recent discussions have felt like more of a hostile takeover than a collaboration, particularly when you casually dismiss all the work Paul has done over the past several months. That is what prompted me to speak up. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>