[tz] Irish Standard Time vs Irish Summer Time

[Stephen Colebourne]

This also broke Java:
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8195595
and no doubt also breaks ThreTen-Backport and Joda-Time (I don't have
time to test them right now).

As I and others have indicated before, this change should not have
happened. The likelihood of it breaking something was always very
high, and the alleged reality is that it expresses is a fact that is
irrelevant to most users (and is disputed anyway). This was change for
changes sake.

The real problem here is the incessant fiddling with the data. The
vast majority of users just want small stable updates representing
actual changes in time zones, not the continuous refactoring we've
been subjected to in the last few years.

Stephen


On 18 January 2018 at 20:24, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> On 01/18/2018 11:40 AM, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
>
>> currently-shipping versions of ICU cannot deal with negative DST offsets;
>> they will refuse to accept the data (illegal argument error).
>
>
> Could you give more details? Is the problem with code that reads tzdb source
> files, or with code that reads binary files produced by zic? How can I
> reproduce the problem from the ICU source code? Is there a
> publicly-available bug report about the problem? (I looked for one in
> <http://bugs.icu-project.org/trac/wiki/IncomingBugs> and couldn't find it.)
> That sort of thing.
>
> I'm asking for these details because there may be a way to implement Irish
> standard time while avoiding the specific problem that the ICU code is
> running into.
>
>> Would it be possible to roll this change out and plan to reintroduce it in
>> the future, along with the changes needed in ICU and CLDR? (As well as a
>> plan to deploy the updated ICU/CLDR to the field). I would also be OK with
>> just backing it out period, but if we’re going to keep this change we need
>> time for ICU and CLDR to adjust.
>
>
> If the problem is serious enough and cannot be worked around, we could back
> out the change in the next tzdb release and then re-add the change later,
> once things have settled down.
>
> I'm concerned as to why this problem wasn't discovered until now. The change
> for Ireland has been in the development repository since December 7 and was
> circulated for comments, and the only specific problem reported for it was
> so trivial that it was not worth worrying about. If ICU depends in crucial
> ways on undocumented properties of tzdb, then ICU maintainers need to
> monitor this mailing list and/or run tests based on the development
> repository, and do that on a regular basis. Otherwise further problems like
> this will be inevitable.
>