Meno Hochschild wrote:
The big majority of Java users is not willing to run any shell scripts or macros
That's fine, and there's no suggestion that they do so. The suggestion is that Java users can continue to use source code files named "africa", "europe", etc., which they get from distributions that are automatically generated by the relevant server sites. Any shell scripts or Makefiles (or Java code, for that matter) used to generate these distributions would be run only on the relatively small number of sites that produce the distributions in question. This is routine practice with other downstream consumers of tzdb, and it is a good way to insulate them from upstream changes that they have compatibility problems with or are otherwise not yet ready for.