[tz] Release policy [WAS: Error Correction Request: Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv]

Fred Gleason fredg at paravelsystems.com
Tue Jul 5 16:27:48 UTC 2022


On Jul 4, 2022, at 14:15, Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> We'll issue a new TZDB release well before a year from now, as Iran is changing their DST rules effective 22 March 2023. Also, more-urgent changes will likely arrive before then, or perhaps the accumulation of non-urgent changes will be enough to justify a release.

This does beg an interesting question. In ‘theory.html’, there is strong encouragement to the authorities that set civil timekeeping rules to allow ample advance notice of changes, with at least one year in advance being the base recommendation. Consider an example where a change has been duly notified to this group a year in advance, vetted to be accurate and implemented in the development version. Is there policy somewhere that states how long before the effective date of the change a release should be cut? I ask because of course shepherding the change through TZDB is merely the first step of a much longer process: the various downstream maintainers must test and package the update (a process that in itself can involve multiple parties and stages —e.g. Android), then the resulting updates must be distributed and (in many cases) manually applied by each end user.

On the basis of the above, how much time would reasonably be “enough” to allow the downstream channels to process a new release?

Cheers!


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| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
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