[tz] Policy Suggestion: Minimum time period betwen releases

[Ali Al Amine]

I do agree that it's not IANA's responsibility to push back against
governments, but that doesn't deny the fact that a lot of governments are
not well organized and such a decision can happen because two people
discussed it in some meeting and that became the decision to go by (a proof
of that is that this is not the first time a thing like this happens on
this group as Howard said). If you have a way to fix every government on
earth, then be my guest. Today it's Lebanon, tomorrow it'll be another
unorganized country that would do the same thing, and the same frustrations
for people that do not have a say on that government (maintainers of this
repository and every vendor needing to propagate the change because 'asap').

I do understand that IANA is responsible to keep its databases updated at
all times, but this specific database has a lot of very
meaningful implications, and its own limitations with the vendor update
times. Applying changes on a whim is definitely not the way to go because
of the possible repercussions.


On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 8:52 PM John Sauter via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 2023-03-27 at 20:37 +0300, Ali Al Amine via tz wrote:
> > The problem is that currently this database is expected to change
> > immediately, as well as vendors are expected to release asap (no
> > expectations, just asap). Having a clear, structured release
> > timeline, and rules that would structure such a mess, would remove
> > the risk of such a thing to happen in the future (or at least it
> > would attempt to organize it). Howard's or my suggestions are trying
> > to setup such a structure.
> >
> > @Rany Yes but that's why there should be a minimum of some sort, a
> > minimum that has a leeway in adding the tz database, as well as for
> > the vendors to update. That way all updates are synchronized as
> > expected by the time people go forward with the change.
> >
> > @Deborah I'm from lebanon, and this is how institutions worked with
> > it with such a short notice:
> > - Banks didn't go forward with the change with international
> > transactions as to not have confusion with the transactions with the
> > international banks and their systems
> > - Apps that rely on cloud providers (like our case) didn't know what
> > to work with as the vendors cannot update on the fly. We contacted
> > AWS for our case as an example and what they told us is that there is
> > no timeline for when the update would happen, so we need to change
> > our codebase to take both into consideration as it might happen at
> > any time and our code should handle the inconsistencies that appear.
> > - Systems that rely on 3rd party vendors (for example quickbooks for
> > accounting, or any software the businesses are relying on) are
> > reporting everything in the wrong date as they didn't update, and
> > they also don't have a timeline for when the update will happen.
> >
> There is nothing that IANA can do to solve the problems you are
> describing.  You need to push back on the politicians--explain to them
> that their decision-making procedures are causing harm to their people.
> Ask them, not IANA, to give enough time between the announcement of
> such a policy and its effective date that updates can be synchronized.
>     John Sauter (John_Sauter at systemeyescomputerstore.com)
> --
> get my PGP public key with gpg --locate-external-keys
> John_Sauter at systemeyescomputerstore.com
>
>
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