[tz] Rule based management vs TZ Coordinator will or voting / fork reason

[Tobias Conradi]

Emails such as the recent ones about ambiguous time zone acronyms can
be avoided if the management of the database would be more rule based.

It seems there is no rule prohibiting one abbreviation from referring
to two offsets within one country at a given point in time. So adding
a rule to the Theory file prohibiting this would be one step.

The other issue is, that if rules exists, e.g.

ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory
----- Scope of the tz database -----
The tz database attempts to record the history and predicted future of
all computer-based clocks that track civil time.  To represent this
data, the world is partitioned into regions whose clocks all agree
about time stamps that occur after the somewhat-arbitrary cutoff point
of the POSIX Epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC).


that they are also enforced.

But the TZ Coordinator is sometimes not enforcing them, as the Siberia
bug (Asia/Tomsk and Asia/Barnaul patch was provided to the list)
shows.

Arbitrary application of rules can be a fork reason.

--
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com/