[tz] Some thoughts about the way forward

Mark Davis ☕️ mark at macchiato.com
Fri Sep 24 13:49:50 UTC 2021


The Unicode ICU team discussed the proposed changes in the TZDB in their
meeting earlier this week and we are reporting the consensus here. This is
an initial report, since time is short.

Members are very concerned about the downstream impact, and the inevitable
compatibility mismatches between different implementations. While the
pre-1970 data may not seem important to some people, the instability caused
by its removal can be considerable, and last for years to come. Even if the
TZDB provides a way to produce data compatible with 2021a or before by
option, this may introduce confusion. For example, an OS packager may pick
a default data package with pre-1970 rules merged, while a library packager
like ICU may pick a variant with pre-1970 data preserved. Previously,
multiple implementations used a single data so there is general
consistency. With the proposed plan, there could be differences in results
before 1970 between multiple implementations, causing problems everywhere -
e.g. Linux and Java, ICU and Linux, etc.

If the change is made, here are the probable steps that would happen in
ICU, based on the two areas that would be affected.


*1. Dropping zone IDs from the zone.tab.*The main impact here is that a lot
of implementations rely on the mapping of zone IDs to ISO country codes.
ICU already has an internal exception table that contains certain
(zone IDs, ISO code) mappings that retains information that used to be in
zone.tab. We would extend that table to add all of the zones dropped by the
proposed change. We would probably also move the data and the rest of
zone.tab to CLDR, so that we have a public, structured set of data in XML
and JSON. This would effectively clone the zone.tab data.

That way, implementations could use the zone.tab information to maintain
the difference between Europe/Oslo and Europe/Berlin. That is, while the
internal software might map Europe/Oslo to Europe/Berlin via a Link to get
rules for evaluation, the library would still treat Europe/Oslo as a
separate ID from Europe/Berlin.



*2. Removing the pre-1970 rules*Or rather, moving the pre-1970 data into a
file that is mixed in with other data that is not currently used. ICU
doesn't want to get into the business of maintaining a fork of the TZDB,
but if another major industry player took that role on, then ICU would
consider adopting it so that the data is maintained.

Mark Davis, Unicode Consortium President and Chair of CLDR
Yoshito Umaoka, Vice Chair of ICU


On Fri, Sep 24, 2021 at 3:38 AM Stephen Colebourne via tz <tz at iana.org>
wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Sept 2021 at 11:05, Eliot Lear via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
> > Before you put out a "good final position", could you please respond to
> > Paul on his compromise proposal.
>
> I think I did just that.
>
> The compromise of a short delay is good. The compromise position of
> smaller chunks of link-merging is unnecessary if we can agree on a
> better alternate solution. Once a better approach is agreed we can lay
> down a specific plan in advance to roll it out, effectively
> side-stepping the negative aspects of multiple separate link-merges.
> As such, it makes no sense to have any link merging in 2021b.
>
> (Paul's compromise position is unclear as to whether he intends to
> have no link-merging in 2021b, or just a smaller amount. Given the
> immediate damage a link-merge causes Joda-Time's millions of users, I
> don't have the ability to compromise on the contents of 2021b wrt
> link-merging. But I do have the ability to seek a consensus solution
> that can be rolled out in a planned manner, even if that requires
> changes to Joda-Time.)
>
> Stephen
>
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