[tz] Breach of tzdb charter: Merging timezones is not within the charter

Tom Lane tgl at sss.pgh.pa.us
Thu Jun 3 02:16:04 UTC 2021


Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz at iana.org> writes:
> This is a formal request to revert the recent patch to merge country
> timezones. I, and others, consider the patch to be utterly
> unacceptable. The patch causes meaningful harm to the status of tzdb,
> and will cause downstream projects significant pain to effectively
> revert the changes - amounting to an effective fork of the project.

While I have no idea whether this change amounts to a "breach of
charter", I second Stephen's opinion that there is effectively going
to be a fork if the change is not reverted.  It seems highly unlikely
to me that users of Postgres will consider it acceptable for old
timestamps in their databases to suddenly change meaning.  When that
happens because better information came to light about past
timekeeping, it's somewhat defensible.  But there won't be any quarter
given for "the tzdb maintainers decided to just toss all this old data
overboard".

I just experimented and confirmed that including backzone isn't nearly
sufficient to bring the output data back to what it was previously.
So that's not likely to be a satisfactory answer for us, and if there
is a fork then we will probably follow it.

Disclaimer: this is just MHO; it is not (yet) Postgres project policy.

			regards, tom lane


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