[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

[Howard Hinnant]

To me this looks like a fork whether another repository is created or not.  With multiple down stream database parsers (as is the case for C++ vendors, and other languages as well), each vendor is going to make a choice as to include backzone or not. Today the choice is obvious:  don’t include, because:

  * there’s not much in it.
  * the comments in the file discourage its use.
  * It has different parsing rules than africa, asia, europe, etc.

By putting more data into backzone, this greatly increases the odds that some vendors are going to adopt backzone, and other’s won’t.

    That’s a fork.
    **************

I would instead like to see a move in the opposite direction:  Consolidation to a single accepted version of the data, even if flawed, that slowly gets better as time goes on.

Howard

On Sep 21, 2021, at 1:03 AM, Eliot Lear via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
> 
> You have but a compiler flag to add, but instead you want to fork?
> 
> Ok.  That'll be fun when I get one time from the OS and one time from PHP when the update policies diverge – and you can bet they will.

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