[tz] [PROPOSED] Support zi parsers that mishandle negative DST offsets

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 11 February 2018 at 22:29, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Stephen Colebourne wrote:
>> you are
>> effectively asking some of its key consumers to fork the project. I
>> find that pretty astonishing.
>
> I would find it astonishing too, if that was what was being suggested. But
> it's not. I'm merely suggesting standard practice that is commonly done by
> other tzdb consumers. For example, you can see it in action here:
>
> https://packages.debian.org/sid/tzdata

These are groups/teams for whom packaging/repackaging is their normal
role. Its not comparable.

In addition, every user of these libraries has gone to IANA for the
files for over 15 years - they understand IANA to be the source of
timezone data. Breaking that is undesirable.

>> there is absolutely no good rationale for making this change
>
> Although there is good rationale for the change, you clearly disagree.

The only visible change for zic is a flag that is
deprecated/discouraged. So why not change zic or the tooling to alter
the flag in the case of Ireland? Its very ego-centric of the project
to put the importance of that flag ahead of all other consumers.

We have had an agreement for many years that the zic input files
represent an API used by other systems, and is therefore protected for
compatibility as an API. While everyone accepts that the importance of
positive SAVE values was not previously established, it clearly is
now. So, it should simply be declared as part of the API. Note that
I've never precluded the tzdb distribution containing other/additional
files with other/additional information, just the protection of the
input source files.

Stephen