[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

Tom Lane tgl at sss.pgh.pa.us
Tue Sep 21 18:40:05 UTC 2021


Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> On 9/21/21 7:08 AM, Tom Lane via tz wrote:
>> if any significant number
>> of vendors start including backzone to restore some approximation
>> of the way things stood before, then there is going to be the same
>> mess from end users' standpoint as a true fork would produce.

> True, and a good reason to not make use of the draft patches that I 
> emailed earlier today in 
> <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030456.html>.

Yeah, I was about to reply to that along similar lines: I think
we should put some value on most people using the same version of
tzdb, so adding options to pick-and-choose subsets of the data
is arguably counterproductive.

> There's another good reason to not use that approach, noted in the 
> bias2021a.bp file in that email:

> # This file should be not be used in production by organizations
> # committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion because it restores
> # the previous tzdb setup, which arguably exhibited racial or national
> # preferences.

TBH, I find that argument to have just about zero merit.  It's not
like the previous state of affairs was deliberately non-diverse,
nor do I believe that the May patches magically removed all potential
complaints of that sort.  I think the way to proceed here is what
has been suggested by several people including me: revert to the
pre-May set of zone data, and make a commitment that we'll accept
properly-researched patches to add per-country zones over time.
(This need not be a commitment that the TZ Coordinator would do
such research.)  I think the reason that e.g. Norway has its own
zone is that somebody did the research to add it once upon a time.
Why should we devalue that effort now?

			regards, tom lane


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