[tz] Proposal: validation text file with releases

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 15 July 2015 at 00:51, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Jon Skeet wrote:
>> Unfortunately dump doesn't have all the information I'd wish it to -
>> namely
>> the split between standard and daylight offsets. It indicates whether a
>> zone is in daylight savings or not, but not how much that contributes to
>> the overall offset.
>
> That shouldn't matter.  No software should care about that.  Any software
> that does care is delving into undocumented and unsupported areas.

The published API of Joda-Time and JSR-310 exposes the difference
between the base offset and the current offset (including DST). Its
this kind of detail that makes them much more useful. To say that
software should not care and that it is unsupported is .... er ....
rather worrying.

I think I've indicated before that I'm not sure this project fully
appreciates or understands the downstream impacts of changes on
systems other than zic. I think Jon's proposals would help to make the
impacts much clearer.

Stephen