[tz] [PROPOSED PATCH 2/2] Use lz format for new tarball

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at systematicsw.ab.ca
Fri Sep 2 04:43:54 UTC 2016


On 2016-09-01 13:08, John Hawkinson wrote:
> I'd like to second Deborah Goldsmith's comments.
>
> Change is hugely disruptive and the tz package is a core element of
> many critical systems. We don't have the luxury of making little
> changes, unlike some others packages. Ideally the current
> distribution format should last for centuries. Supplementing it is
> fine, but removing it should be off the table.

For a commercial example, the Oracle/Sun Java TZupdater tool documents at
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-readme-136440.html
that by default it assumes the latest data is available at
http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tzdata-latest.tar.gz
and I am sure I am not the only one with a script to check daily if the
symlink destination changes, and download and apply the updates locally
to systems with zoneinfo or Java, pending availability of officially
updated releases, some of which may lag IANA releases by days, weeks,
or months on some platforms. Many organizations have policies that only
officially blessed vendor releases may be loaded and tested on systems.

> On Aug. 8, Paul remarked that he expected an October release would be
> the first to incorporate the leap second changes for this December.
> That is 2 months; that is not a comfortable amount of time.

I suspect that right zoneinfo is not hugely important to the vast majority
of tz users, but it is probably critical to those who do use it for their
work, and updates will require work dealing with future times to be redone.
Those who require it have to download the IERS file as soon as it is updated,
regenerate the right data with every tz release, then rerun all their own
dependent processes.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada


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