[tz] OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Ireland change

[Philip Paeps]

On 2018-01-26 18:56:04 (+0000), Stephen Colebourne wrote:
>On 26 January 2018 at 18:29, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>> I'm proposing a patch so that the CLDR project doesn't need to make such an
>> abrupt swap. CLDR can have a transition period as long as you like, during
>> which CLDR will work with both current and proposed tzdb.
>
>This merely replaces correct text with incorrect text.
>
>Why should the citizens of Ireland have worse textual zone names than
>everyone else merely to satisfy TZDB's need for purity? Why is TZDB so
>important that every other part of the software stack should be worse?

It's not a matter of "purity".  It's a matter of "correctness".

Software that cannot cope with correct data is simply called "broken".

As pointed out elsethread: people will keep messing with time.  The fact 
that broken software has been able to cope until now is merely luck.  
It's unrealistic to expect the tzdb to get increasingly incorrect over 
time because broken software cannot cope with correct data.

If tzdb is correct and other parts of the software stack are incorrect, 
those other parts are indeed "worse", as you say.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information