Hi Paul, I welcome the direction that this is going in, but I've some observations: On Fri, 4 Jun 2021, Paul Eggert via tz wrote:
There's been a clear need expressed to support tzdb users who would rather not deal with the effects of the recently-proposed alike-since-1970 patch. On the other hand there are also fairness and guideline-oriented reasons for the patch, which was originally discussed and installed with more than our usual care and review.
Wrt to "fairness". Although IMO it is sad to see that some tzids don't have pre-1970 data, I don't think you can call it "fair" to then remove/restrict/hide away this data for tzids which have this data. "If I can't have it, you can't have it" is fairly infantile, IMO.
From what I remember, the policy/guideline has always just been "don't split up zones for only pre-1970 data", without any mentions of hiding the data that we already have behind a flag.
Because of the extensive followup discussions I don't see how a single version could be appealing to both sides of this disagreement.
So I propose we add a Makefile or similar build-time option to let tzdb users have it either way. Set the flag one way, and it will be as if the recently-proposed changes did not occur. Set it the other way, and you'll get the changes.
Who was actively asking for the data to be restricted? I might have missed it when going through the whole thread, but I don't think there was anybody (besides yourself) actively asking for this to happen. If there was nobody actively asking for the pre-1970 to be hidden for some zones, does it really make sense to add such a new flag, especially considering it will add more work for the TZ Coordinator? If current users don't care about pre-1970 data, then can already invoke zic with "zic -r @0" as is documented in zic(8).
If there is support for this idea, I expect to be able to implement this option soon, in plenty of time before any urgent change due to a real-world rule change arrives.
As Stephen said, I would prefer that the current state to be reversed first, and then we can discuss what we want in the other thread that Stephen started. cheers, Derick -- PHP 7.4 Release Manager Host of PHP Internals News: https://phpinternals.news Like Xdebug? Consider supporting me: https://xdebug.org/support https://derickrethans.nl | https://xdebug.org | https://dram.io twitter: @derickr and @xdebug