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

[Robert Elz]

  From: Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org>
  Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:03:59 +0000
  Subject: Re: [tz] [english 100%] Re: [english 100%] Re:
     OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Irelandchange

  | On 26 January 2018 at 07:15, Robert Elz <kre at munnari.oz.au> wrote:
  | > Why do we need all this?

  | Because applications have APIs that they want to continue to support
  | in a backwards compatible way.

That's not useful - who uses those APIs, and for what purpose?

  | Just because zic/posiz doesn't expose data doesn't mean
  | its not useful.

Nor does exposing it make it useful.   The question was whether it
has any real uses or not, not whether there possibly could be.

  | TZDB has known about the Ireland issue since 2005.

To me personally, the Ireland issue is almost irrelevant - it
simply exposed limitations in users of the tzdata that we didn't
know about.   A much bigger one is the "just two names" (which is
enforced by the API apparently exposing a boolean as the selector,
or so it seems from what we have been told).   That is completely
broken.

Personally I think the wole notion of "standard" time that applies
for less than half the year, and "other time" which applies for the
rest is just plain silly.

If CLDR was using names to index rather than "is the offset 0",
it would both be able to access more than 2 names, and it would
not care whether transitions that put the clocks forward come
logically before of after transitions that put the clocks back.
They're all just transitions that are altering the offset from UTC.

Everything beyond that is just soeone's imagination.

kre