[tz] Irish Standard Time vs Irish Summer Time

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/18/2018 11:40 AM, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:

> currently-shipping versions of ICU cannot deal with negative DST offsets; they will refuse to accept the data (illegal argument error).

Could you give more details? Is the problem with code that reads tzdb 
source files, or with code that reads binary files produced by zic? How 
can I reproduce the problem from the ICU source code? Is there a 
publicly-available bug report about the problem? (I looked for one in 
<http://bugs.icu-project.org/trac/wiki/IncomingBugs> and couldn't find 
it.) That sort of thing.

I'm asking for these details because there may be a way to implement 
Irish standard time while avoiding the specific problem that the ICU 
code is running into.

> Would it be possible to roll this change out and plan to reintroduce it in the future, along with the changes needed in ICU and CLDR? (As well as a plan to deploy the updated ICU/CLDR to the field). I would also be OK with just backing it out period, but if we’re going to keep this change we need time for ICU and CLDR to adjust.

If the problem is serious enough and cannot be worked around, we could 
back out the change in the next tzdb release and then re-add the change 
later, once things have settled down.

I'm concerned as to why this problem wasn't discovered until now. The 
change for Ireland has been in the development repository since December 
7 and was circulated for comments, and the only specific problem 
reported for it was so trivial that it was not worth worrying about. If 
ICU depends in crucial ways on undocumented properties of tzdb, then ICU 
maintainers need to monitor this mailing list and/or run tests based on 
the development repository, and do that on a regular basis. Otherwise 
further problems like this will be inevitable.