[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

[Watson Ladd]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 9:51 AM Howard Hinnant via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>
> The C++20 standard has adopted the IANA timezone database (not the code) as the basis for a major part of its API:  http://eel.is/c++draft/time.zone#general-1
>
> I plea for stability.  That doesn’t mean no changes.  But it does mean no drastic changes.

Unfortunately you are held hostage to the wishes of British Canadian
chicken farmers, Indiana counties, etc, etc. in determining what the
zones will be. The set of zones may increase due to post-1970 changes
in ways that we cannot predict. And the C++20 standard thankfully does
not include the list of zones in the API.

The objections to removal of the pre-1970 data (which affects very few
users on computers) seem to be about ancillary effects on the number
of zones, and I think the discussion should be about the zone names
themselves. The TZ database has never had a one name per country at
least policy.

Sincerely,
Watson Ladd
>
> Howard
>