[tz] Downstream use of 2021c

Paul Ganssle paul.tz at ml.ganssle.io
Thu Oct 7 13:36:13 UTC 2021


What I've done for Python's tzdata so far is that I released 2021.2 as 
2021a+Samoa+Jordan, then I immediately made a 2021.2.post0 release that 
is just a straight repackaging of 2021b. In Python's system it's not too 
hard to explicitly rule out a version (i.e. depend on "tzdata != 
2021.2.post0"), so I figured this was the "best of both worlds" approach.

I haven't repackaged 2021c yet because it seems like most of the major 
bugfixes in 2021c are fixes to regressions that happened between 2021a 
and 2021b, so anyone who is affected by these can use tzdata != 
2021.2.post0, and I didn't want to continue maintaining this two-track 
versioning system (since blacklisting a single revision is not much of a 
pain, but blacklisting a sequence of revisions is a lot more annoying).

If the removal of "most" of the controversial link changes is enough for 
the crowd upset by the changes in 2021b, it would certainly be nice to 
go back to just automatically cutting binary releases from the release 
tarballs...

Best,
Paul

On 10/7/21 00:26, Philip Paeps via tz wrote:
> Since the tzdata 2021c release removed most of the controversial link 
> changes, I wonder how other downstreams feel about importing it. I 
> spent some time this morning looking at the downstreams I know about.
>
> FreeBSD has 2021c in main but is still on 2021a plus Samoa and Jordan 
> in the supported stable branches.
>
> Debian is in the same state as FreeBSD.
> NetBSD, OpenBSD and Ubuntu are on 2021a + Samoa and Jordan.
> Fedora is on 2021b.
> CentOS is on 2021a.
> A casual glance at other Linux distributions shows they are either on 
> 2021a or 2021c.  I am not familiar with their support models so I 
> can't read anything into that.
>
> Python "pytz" seems to be on 2021c.  Python "tzdata" seems to be in a 
> similar state to FreeBSD, though I'm not sure I'm interpreting the 
> release model correctly.  I know Paul G is on this mailing list though.
>
> As far as I can tell, PostgreSQL is still on 2021a without 
> modifications for Samoa and Jordan.  Tom will correct me if I'm 
> reading that wrong.
>
> I don't know enough about PHP, Java or any of the other well-known 
> (let alone less well-known) downstreams to figure out what they're doing.
>
> This is looking terribly fragmented.  Spare a thought for a 
> hypothetical engineer tasked with debugging a Java application on 
> Debian with some Python scripts on Fedora talking to a PostgreSQL 
> database running on FreeBSD...
>
> While discussions on this list appear to have become more 
> constructive, it looks like we're still lacking a clear consensus on 
> the long-term direction.
>
> I feel that 2021c is a pretty reasonable compromise and would be 
> willing to merge it to the supported FreeBSD releases.  Is this 
> something other downstreams would consider too?
>
> Alternatively, can we reach an interim consensus for a 2021d release 
> that we'd all be willing to merge?
>
> Philip
>


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