[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Mon Sep 20 08:06:56 UTC 2021


Hi all,
As most of you probably know, there is a dispute about the tzdb
maintainer's recent changes to merge large numbers of time-zones
[1][2]. These have the effect of wiping out historic time-zone
information on many locations where the data has been in tzdb for many
years.

It appears that there is soon to be a new release of tzdb containing
these changes. In my opinion, the correct behaviour of the tzdb
maintainer would be to revert the controversial changes before doing a
release.

In the event that the tzdb maintainer does not revert, consideration
must be given to forking the project. The purpose of the fork would
initially be to maintain the tzdb data set as it was prior to the
dispute. This would then be released in parallel to the original tzdb
to ensure that downstream projects do not each do their own thing (ie.
to minimize incompatibilities downstream).

Is there support for a fork?
Is anyone willing to help out?
Is any other group willing to sponsor tzdb (eg. CLDR or Red Hat)?

Please reply to this thread with an indication of support and/or help.

thanks
Stephen Colebourne

[1] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-June/thread.html
[2] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030372.html


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