[tz] draft of change summary for next tz release

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 19 September 2013 16:37, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Alan Barrett wrote:
>> we have not been aware of such controversial changes before.
>
> And that's the main difference.  In the past, development
> was made privately, with intermediate patches sometimes
> emailed to the list but often not, and the only real notice of a change
> was a new release.  Now that I've been doing things on a public
> github site, we're getting lots more comments from people affected
> by changes as they're being considered.  So even though the development
> practice is roughly the same as before, and even though the proposed
> set of changes is far less intrusive than some previous changesets,
> people are understandably concerned by seeing the details of a process
> that were formerly invisible.

I humbly suggest that its not the more open process that caused recent
long threads, but the nature of the changes proposed. One email
described it as "revolution not evolution" IIRC. Had you used the same
open process, but not made any of the controversial changes I simply
do not think that there would have been the same level of debate. ie.
not all of us see the last two months as being "roughly the same as
before".

The real question at this point is not what has happened, but what
will happen. Do you believe you have effective consensus to release as
is? Or do you believe you will gain greater harmony by selecting an
uncontroversial subset to release now?

Stephen