[tz] Adding a "test" region?

Philip Paeps philip at trouble.is
Wed Jan 24 22:52:30 UTC 2018


On 2018-01-24 17:37:04 (-0500), Paul G wrote:
>I really disagree with making it a sub-region of an arbitrary geographical region. That will just cause confusion as to whether it's real or not. If it's under "TestZones" it will be obvious enoguh. Plus, "number of regions never increases" is an unwarranted assumption, so that alone argues for adding it as a separate region.

Yeah.  The subzone probably isn't a great idea.

Just having something obviously (to endusers) but not too obviously (to 
downstream consumers averse to testing) fictional at the top-level is 
probably the best way forward.

Calling it "Test" is almost 100% guaranteed to ensure it'll never 
actually be tested.  May as well hide it in the Makefile somewhere.

>Of course this is going to break some software (or really, make it 
>obvious that software is already broken) - the point is to break the 
>software *now* when the maintainers of said broken software can just 
>filter out the `TestZone` region while they are working on removing the 
>unwarranted assumptions, rather than break it when Iceland decides (or 
>rather, recognizes) that leap seconds are a bad idea and changes their 
>official timekeeping to a TAI-based zone.

Agree.

Though I feel it would be better if it were less obvious to filter.  I'd 
prefer an end user spend two milliseconds wondering 'where is Negative 
Save Land? ... ooh!  Fictional ocean.  Cute easter egg!' to distributors 
not testing ever.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information


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