[tz] [PATCH] Replace some zones with links when that doesn't lose useful info.

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Fri Jul 11 18:51:05 UTC 2014


On 07/11/2014 07:19 AM, Marc Lehmann wrote:
> Never before did I hear that changes from one set of (likely bogus) data to another set of (likely bogus) data is ok because it doesn't cause "signficant disruption".

Even if you didn't hear about it, we have done changes like that in the 
past, and we did not encounter problems in the field because the changes 
were done reasonably conservatively, just as the current set of changes 
will be done reasonably conservatively once things are ironed out.  I 
appreciate having more eyes to check over the changes these days to make 
sure that significant disruptions will not ensue, and so far we've 
gotten useful reports from Alan Barrett, Tim Parenti, and David Patte 
along these lines, which will improve the quality of the database.

We do make mistakes, and generate a release that does cause significant 
disruption.  The most recent example of this was the disruption caused 
by the 2014c release, which broke GNOME's Glib. Testing to avoid 
significant disruption to end users should focus on those sorts of 
issues; in contrast, there's no real need to worry about minor 
adjustments to the placeholder UT offset of Upper Volta in 1911.


More information about the tz mailing list