[tz] Estimate for a new tzdb release with Brazil rules.

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at SystematicSw.ab.ca
Mon May 13 19:42:52 UTC 2019


On 2019-05-13 11:35, Rodrigo Brüning Wessler wrote:
> Em sex, 10 de mai de 2019 às 19:41, Paul Eggert escreveu:
>> On 5/10/19 8:45 AM, Pramoth Murali wrote:
>>> Do we have an estimate for when the new tzdb release might be available 
>>> containing the Brazil rules?
>> Not really. As a general rule we don't do release schedules.
>>> Is there any way I can request this be updated sooner than later?
>> Yes, and you just did. :-)
>>> My company would ideally prefer to align with a more formal release 
>>> cadence to get these changes.
>> You can test or deliver systems based by using the tzdb development 
>> repository, which you can get as described in:
>> https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tz-link.html
>> It even comes with a version number; run the command 'make version'. It 
>> currently has the proposed patches for Brazil.
> I understood your explanation, but I would like to endorse the request. =)
> Here, we have a lot of customers in the area of health care in Brazil and
> many features in the system include scheduling, so, we need to update the
> system as early as possible.> For many reasons, use the development repository is not easy for us.
Asking the *volunteer* maintainers to hurry up are the wrong people to ask to
provide the info sooner. Have your national airline, IT, and travel orgs,
vendors, CIOs, and your own companies demand *your paid* senior bureacrats,
civil servants, politicians, and ministers to notify this list directly
<tz at iana.org> about any change to time regulations, with a web link to their
online published legislation, and do so with as many months notice as possible,
as they would with e.g. tax legislation because these changes also have many
legal impacts, to allow Apple, Google, MS, IBM/RedHat, and every company and
distro affected to prepare updates in advance.

Whatever the volunteer maintainers do is irrelevant when countries don't
directly send links to legal notices of changes to this mailing list, leaving
those who participate here to hopefully notice mentions of legislation, suggest
and implement patches to the development repo, generate the official releases,
have all the downstream distros, vendors, libraries, and apps maintainers
download, apply, build, and test changes, then distribute them to every device
owner in the world.

In face of the current reality of politicians making changes with no notice, you
really have to make a choice: improve and speed up your processes, or change
your policy about when and where you get the data, or ideally both, as well as
berating bureacrats and politicians for more evidence of their inability to
adequately plan, as evidenced in their abysmal records on government IT
projects, many of which are abandoned and never implemented.

Perhaps we should have a stated public release schedule: we will have at least
two scheduled releases a year, in January and July, including all changes
enacted by their respective goverments before the previous July and January
respectively.

*"Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part!"*

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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