[tz] On ISO country for timezones (Re: Classifying IDs)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Stephen Colebourne wrote in
 <CACzrW9Cau-q2e+yoBcg=7Rztu19zZN582Xca9ZMYbz=H_0iOpw at mail.gmail.com>:
 |On Thu, 7 Oct 2021 at 07:08, Watson Ladd via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
 ...
 |I agree with backwards compatibility. The primary concern here is
 |whether an ID is considered deprecated or not.

IDs shall be stable and not change at all.  At maximum they should
be moved to backward, for example if a zone is renamed (which may
happen for example for Ukraine in a not too distant future, if
that is still necessary then, and it looks as if it would be).

I would always have been all for making infinite stability of IDs
a documented assertion.

Even if not, your "six months" claim is nothing but an aggressive
statement.  I think this entire thread is shadowboxing and noise
for nothing.

Looking at the interface of your JAVA framework i think getID()
should simply return the correct ID, which may be a link if it is
one, and just in case this is not what getID() already returns.

In my opinion there are only two problems with IANA TZ and how
Paul Eggert manages it as a maintainer.  That is the same Paul
Eggert who contributes to this software since 1995, an astonishing
26 years.  Corroding the maintainership with a continuous stream
of noise is disgusting.

The first is combining of datasets to equal-post-1970 bundles,
which is going on for many years.  But the data is there, it is in
backzone, and everybody can easily install a complete TZ DB on
one's own request.  Yet noone did, even though many packagers are
on this list.  This is schizophrenic.  But maybe it is only
because of black and yellow people do not matter as much as some
blue-eyed white people from northern Europe, which does not truly
come as a surprise given the audience who possibly reads this now,
and given the fact that colonianisation ended only about 55 years
ago, and de facto was only turned from armed political to armed
material oppression.

The second is that documentation did not follow suit the code
improvements, as has been recently shown for tzselect(8) and the
-t option.  That tzselect(8) uses the administrative zone1970.tab
and not the end-user-preferrable zone.tab is a different thing.

If you want to enforce upon the maintainer of the TZ database that
the pre-1970 data is joined back into the normal data, or that
"backzone" is splitted into "backzone" and "unreliable", and/or
that "backzone" is included by default, and/or that "ZFLAGS='-r
@0'" is made default, then create a thread and try to gain enough
hums, but please stop this subversion by spreading uncertainty and
that even upon topics which never were under discussion as far as
i know, and i also read this list for a decade now.
It must anyway be said it was nicer once i only had the
distribution and did not know about the list :)

Ciao from Germany,

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)