[tz] Tonga returns to DST on 2016-11-06

[Paul.Koning at dell.com]

> On Nov 3, 2016, at 6:08 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU> wrote:
> 
> On 11/02/2016 09:57 AM, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
>> I know it’s checked into the informal GitHub repository. That doesn’t work for everyone.
> 
> Now that we have an official release with the Tonga changes, your developers should be OK to run with it.
> 
> Why doesn't the GitHub development repository work for them? Are there technical problems with using Git or GitHib? Or is this more a case of not using the data until it's "blessed" somehow? Either way, there should be some way to address the problem other than by having your folks wait impatiently for tarballs to show up at iana.org.

There needs to be an official source that has acceptable latency and reliability.  It has to be documented as being that official source.

It's ok to have unofficial sources but they aren't official sources, as the term indicates.  

It's also possible to have several official sources, for fault tolerance or improved latency.  If that is done, they have to match (give or take latency for the most recent update) and there must be a straightforward and reliable way to recognize a new change.

If you want to give up on IANA and make Github the official source, that's certainly an option.  If you want to keep IANA as the sole official source, that's another option.  But if you call X the official source, you should not be surprised when people are hesitant to use unofficial source Y rather than official source X.

	paul