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

[Paul Eggert]

Brian Inglis wrote:
> 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.

I doubt whether there are many practical end-user applications of this sort. The 
usages I've seen are regression testing and so forth, which need to deal with 
more-urgent tz updates anyway. Serious astronomical users must deal not only 
with leap seconds but also with a lot of other things, and I expect that they 
have longstanding procedures for this stuff in place and do not need or use tz's 
leap seconds.

Any end users who need a tz-based leap-second table accurate months into the 
future have had to deal with this problem for many years, as we've been 
reasonably lackadaisical about generating new releases if the only reason was a 
leap-second that is months in the future.

If this were a significant issue, it would be straightforward for a downstream 
distributor like Ubuntu or FreeBSD to use the latest leapseconds file from NIST 
or from GitHub. I don't know of any distributor who's done so.