
Given some recent last minute end of year announcements, could I please suggest creating a new document to formally track metadata about every time change notice's lead time from 2019, as a basis for stats, info, distributor/vendor additions and enhancements, walls of shame, etc. as this has never yet been suggested AFAIR. I could see vendors like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle dev groups adding columns to local copies to track their own responses, and using those to prod government officials to do better. The document could be a text file containing an HTML document with a table tracking: CC, announcement date[/time], effective date[/time], lead time in years-months-days [hours:minutes:seconds], tzdb release date[/time], tzdb release lead time +/- in years-months-days [hours:minutes:seconds], whether change affects STD, whether change affects DST, number of zones impacted, list of zones impacted, comments about missing details etc.; with dates[/times] in ISO formats (and perhaps also Unix format metadata attributes, allowing for JS HTML text display customization and sorting by third party users); times only specified when useful or notice is days, and times are available and accurate. If anyone has been doing this already, perhaps they could contribute their data; and anyone with interest and time could backfill data from mailing list posts. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised.

Brian Inglis wrote:
Given some recent last minute end of year announcements, could I please suggest creating a new document to formally track metadata about every time change
Something like that might be nice, but I'm afraid I don't have the time to work on it myself. An effort like that might start with a prototype for the data for 2018, as pretty much all the information is public, either in the tz mailing list archives, or cited in URLs to dated pages.

On 2018-12-30 10:33:29 (-0700), Brian Inglis wrote:
Given some recent last minute end of year announcements
Not just the end of year ... I remember quite a few short- and no-notice changes this year.
could I please suggest creating a new document to formally track metadata about every time change notice's lead time from 2019, as a basis for stats, info, distributor/vendor additions and enhancements, walls of shame, etc. as this has never yet been suggested AFAIR.
Excellent idea!
If anyone has been doing this already, perhaps they could contribute their data; and anyone with interest and time could backfill data from mailing list posts.
Starting with 2019 would be a very good start. Philip -- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Ministry of Information

I could probably whip up something basic as an early prototype for broader feedback. I agree that starting with notices received from 2019-01-01T00Z onwards is probably a reasonable cutoff for now. -- Tim Parenti On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 13:02, Philip Paeps <philip@trouble.is> wrote:
On 2018-12-30 10:33:29 (-0700), Brian Inglis wrote:
Given some recent last minute end of year announcements
Not just the end of year ... I remember quite a few short- and no-notice changes this year.
could I please suggest creating a new document to formally track metadata about every time change notice's lead time from 2019, as a basis for stats, info, distributor/vendor additions and enhancements, walls of shame, etc. as this has never yet been suggested AFAIR.
Excellent idea!
If anyone has been doing this already, perhaps they could contribute their data; and anyone with interest and time could backfill data from mailing list posts.
Starting with 2019 would be a very good start.
Philip
-- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Ministry of Information

Hi, If you could do up a prototype and a sample entry, I can fill up 2018 and send in git pull requests. On Mon, 31 Dec 2018, 2:26 am Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com wrote:
I could probably whip up something basic as an early prototype for broader feedback. I agree that starting with notices received from 2019-01-01T00Z onwards is probably a reasonable cutoff for now.
-- Tim Parenti
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 13:02, Philip Paeps <philip@trouble.is> wrote:
On 2018-12-30 10:33:29 (-0700), Brian Inglis wrote:
Given some recent last minute end of year announcements
Not just the end of year ... I remember quite a few short- and no-notice changes this year.
could I please suggest creating a new document to formally track metadata about every time change notice's lead time from 2019, as a basis for stats, info, distributor/vendor additions and enhancements, walls of shame, etc. as this has never yet been suggested AFAIR.
Excellent idea!
If anyone has been doing this already, perhaps they could contribute their data; and anyone with interest and time could backfill data from mailing list posts.
Starting with 2019 would be a very good start.
Philip
-- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Ministry of Information

I've put something together using GitHub Pages; the advantage being that the metadata can stay in a machine-readable format (in this case, YAML), while the Jekyll engine can render pretty pages and do calculations for human consumption. (The choice of technologies is maybe not my immediate preference, but this strikes me as most readily sustainable, by far.) Browse the metadata at https://tzdata-meta.timtimeonline.com/ View the repository at https://github.com/timparenti/tzdata-meta I intentionally kept the data a bit leaner, though, than Brian's original suggestions, and have backfilled metadata through changes the tz mailing list was first informed of since 2016-01-01T00Z. 2016 had a lot of changes (particularly in Russia) which were going on simultaneously, which made tracking down some of the original emails more difficult, and so there's a bit of guesswork involved. I don't intend to go back any further than this, nor do I particularly encourage others to do so, either. If there are glaring omissions that keep this resource from being as useful as it could be, I'm happy to hear it, though I am interested in keeping this relatively lean so that it can remain fairly easily updated as new changes to tzdata arise. -- Tim Parenti On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 13:26, Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com> wrote:
I could probably whip up something basic as an early prototype for broader feedback. I agree that starting with notices received from 2019-01-01T00Z onwards is probably a reasonable cutoff for now.
-- Tim Parenti
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 13:02, Philip Paeps <philip@trouble.is> wrote:
On 2018-12-30 10:33:29 (-0700), Brian Inglis wrote:
Given some recent last minute end of year announcements
Not just the end of year ... I remember quite a few short- and no-notice changes this year.
could I please suggest creating a new document to formally track metadata about every time change notice's lead time from 2019, as a basis for stats, info, distributor/vendor additions and enhancements, walls of shame, etc. as this has never yet been suggested AFAIR.
Excellent idea!
If anyone has been doing this already, perhaps they could contribute their data; and anyone with interest and time could backfill data from mailing list posts.
Starting with 2019 would be a very good start.
Philip
-- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Ministry of Information

Thanks, this looks helpful. At some point with your permission this (or something like it) could be hosted as part of the project. In the meantime I added the attached citation to tz-link. As part of the subject of the metadata I'll have quibbles, for example, it doesn't capture the fact that Brazil changed its mind twice in November with the effects cancelling out and the "wrong" version never released as part of tzdata. Still, it's an impressive summary.
participants (5)
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Brian Inglis
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Paul Eggert
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Philip Paeps
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Sanjeev Gupta
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Tim Parenti