[tz] Please remove tzdata2018f

[Philip Paeps]

On 2019-02-21 16:31:39 (+0900), Ankur Rana wrote:
> While doing tzdata upgrade to version 2018f

Note that you should really be upgrading to 2018i, which is the latest 
version.

> java.lang.Exception: Failed while parsing file '/tmp/tz.tmp/asia' on 
> line 1842 'Rule      Japan 1948  1951  -     Sep   Sat>=8      25:00 0 
>     S'

Java is known to be broken with respect to the last ten years or so of 
changes to the tzdb data format.  You'll need to generate "rearguard" 
format data to feed to the Java updater.

Paul also helpfully provides rearguard tarballs on his webpage 
https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~eggert/tz/release/.

You can easily generate those yourself by running make 
rearguard_tarballs on the distribution from iana.org.

> To avoid any reoccurrence of same, would it be possible to prevent the 
> tzdata version 2018f from downloading on iana site?

It seems silly to pull one release from an archive going back to 1993 
because one third-party implementation (even if it's a popular one) 
cannot cope with the data format.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information