[tz] draft of change summary for next tz release

[Andy Heninger]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> Andy Heninger wrote:
>
> > Can I suggest that we split this into two updates, the first containing
> > only the Fiji change
>
> For convenience, if you'd like to have just the Fiji patch
> (relative to 2013d) it's appended to this email.
>
> As for redoing the patches and generating two updates,
> sorry, I thought I'd covered this point earlier, but I
> can't seem to find it in my outgoing mail, so I guess not.
> Anyway, in the past we haven't bothered to split out changes
> like that, and common practice has been for software
> distributions to incorporate just the changes they want, if
> they're leery about upgrading to a new release.  For example,
> Fedora 19 is using 2013c, but is incorporating post-2013c
> patches for Morocco and Israel; see:
>

We try to have the time zone data in use be exactly the latest public tz
data, identified by it's public name, 2013d or whatever. Patching is always
possible, it's just cleaner and more convenient not to have to. The Fedora
approach of patching the data but continuing to identify it as something
that it is not can lead to real confusion.

In an ideal world, from my perspective, changes that affect the present or
near future time would be kept separate from other changes, and have a
fast-track release process. And perhaps substantial cleanup and historical
data updates would be kept away from the busy times in March-April, and
September-October, when all too many countries seem to think it's OK to
announce that they changed their clocks last weekend.

Thanks,

  -- Andy
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