[tz] draft of change summary for next tz release

Steffen Daode Nurpmeso sdaoden at gmail.com
Fri Sep 20 12:07:36 UTC 2013


Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
 |it less fun.  And let's not discount the cost of making
 |things less fun in a volunteer project.  The large quantity

 |have been responded to.  The remaining objections are either
 |vague (so there's not much specific one can do), or
 |suggestions to complicate the development process (not a

 |Dozens of emails about a minor cleanup of what is almost
 |surely bogus noise?

To have it said once: i would love to see a kind person that
respects cultural circumstances when they arise as the maintainer
of the TZ database, not one who irons over them.  It's surely only
because of misunderstanding, but that doesn't make it any better.

The only real, usable improvement in all that discussion was the
suggestion that the data could be improved and that the tools
could be adjusted to cramp the range that is used to build the
binary data, so as to save space (and maybe speedup some
algorithm, i have never dealt with the TZ code).  Zefram seemed to
be willing to write the code necessary for that.  Imho it would be
an improvement if that would be possible, adding some new valid
historical data, leaving it off on purpose, on request.  *Much*
better than the other way around, for sure.

Speaking of it, and being on a level with it:

  ?0[steffen at sherwood tz.git]$ git blame --line-porcelain origin/master -- europe | sed -n 's/^author //p' | sort | uniq -c
  2868 Arthur David Olson
   155 Paul Eggert
  ?0[steffen at sherwood tz.git]$ git lo -1 0fdbcdc                        
  * 0fdbcdc Release tzcode2013a and tzdata2013a.
  ?0[steffen at sherwood tz.git]$ git blame --line-porcelain 0fdbcdc -- europe | sed -n 's/^author //p' | sort | uniq -c
  2925 Arthur David Olson
    48 Paul Eggert

I personally, and having spoken with noone whomsoever, am the
opinion that the TZ database would be better off if a project like
NetBSD, that aims in producing portable code, and regulary tests
it on a widespread basis, would hold both the code but also the
data as trustee for IANA.  I think this change would be a win for
both parts of TZ.  It is hard to imagine that, there, such
changes, and especially the irritating ones, would be introduced
at first.

I agree that it was much nicer once i didn't know how the result
was achieved.

--steffen
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