[tz] Magallanes region from Chile will keep DST all year round

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/23/2017 04:35 PM, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
> If it’s unimportant to release this change early, why can’t people just wait before they turn the crank if they don’t care about it?

Because it takes work to decide whether to wait. We've had a
longstanding tradition to not release tzdb versions merely because of
trivial or non-urgent changes, based on the principle that we often get
short notice anyway and so any redistribution should work on short
notice, and that omitting unnecessary releases saves everybody time. If
we started to release more often, we would in effect be asking every
downstream developer and distributor to inspect every release and decide
whether that release's changes are important and urgent enough for them
to update.

If the problem is that ICU won't look at tzdata except just after an
"official" tzdb release and that the ICU folks then take some time to do
translations and that Apple won't use the new tzdb update until after
ICU has done their translations, then that leisurely process needs to be
streamlined regardless of tzdb's version numbering scheme. If this
diagnosis is correct, I suggest that Apple work with ICU to have a more
incremental process where ICU does not wait until an "official" tzdb
release before starting work on translating changes. This should not
involve any major technical change on ICU's side (they merely need to
use version 2016j-38-g46c2bbf instead of version 2016j, say). ICU will
have to track tzdb more closely, but that will be true no matter what
version-numbering scheme is used. The main problem here is the delay in
downstream translation, not in whether the current tzdb version is
called '2016j-38-g46c2bbf' or '2017a'.