[tz] [english 100%] Re: OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Ireland change

[Guy Harris]

On Jan 25, 2018, at 1:40 PM, Meno Hochschild <mhochschild at gmx.de> wrote:

> In order to bridge the gap between the offset information in TZDB and the simple scheme generic/standard/daylight in CLDR, would it not be a good enhancement to TZDB source format to add an extra column per rule line to flag if the dst offset (equal if zero, negative or positive) has to be considered as associated with standard time labelling? Then the consumer would not have to reason about (dstOffset == 0) <=> isStandardTimeFormat() as actually done in Java software. Such a column could even be enhanced by an extra state for the ramadan situation in some Arabic countries when the clock only temporarily switches back (enabling a better name). The actual column containing an abbreviation is not really clear about this name-offset-association IMHO and can therefore not be evaluated by source code based tz-compilers.

...combined with a tool that translates the new tzdb files into "old-style" tzdb files for use by programs other than zic, to stave off "butbutbutbutbut that'll break XXX!" complaints about changes to the .tz file format.

(And, were we to extend the .tz file format, perhaps replacing the abbreviations in the "FORMAT" column with an identifier that refers to a new type of line in the file; the new type of line could give abbreviations and English-language long names for all N of the different time types in that time zone?  We could call those, oh, say, "metazones" or something such as that. :-))