[tz] Undoing the effect of the new alike-since-1970 patch

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Wed Jun 9 20:12:56 UTC 2021


On 6/9/21 2:29 AM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:

> I'm not worried about the comments if that is what you are thinking
> of. I'm more concerned about exactly what the output you are proposing
> will contain - it is not clear to me.

Yes, I was definitely thinking of the comments. Also, the ordering of 
Zones (which is irrelevant). Stuff like that. The idea is that the 
generated TZif files should be identical to what they would have been 
without the alike-since-1970 patch. I would expect similar results in 
downstream systems that don't use TZif.

> I've yet to see a willingness to engage on
> backwards compatibility - to stop fiddling with the data.

How about this: we could say that we won't do any sort of merging like 
this in the future. In other words, this is the last time we'll be 
merging legacy zones because they differ only before 1970. Would a 
statement like that help? We could put such a statement into the NEWS 
file, say.

> your patch (and probably previous ones) are
> making a political statement of the kind you say you don't want. 

Sure, but no matter what we do we'll be making a political statement. 
The statement I'd like to see is "let's avoid political data when we 
can". Admittedly not everyone agrees (which is also politics :-).


More information about the tz mailing list