[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

[Paul Eggert]

On 9/20/21 11:03 AM, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:

> I also believe that discriminating against countries like Angola and
> Niger is unacceptable. But the solution to that is the same as it
> always has been - to include full data for each ISO country, using
> best efforts for data that is not certain.

I addressed this issue toward the end of my recent email to Tom Lane 
<https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030422.html>, which I 
sent about the same time you sent your email.


> The *only* good faith move you can make right now is to revert the
> patch.

We disagree on this point. This morning I made a different good-faith 
move, by installing the "Revert May patch to zone.tab" patch into the 
development database. I suggested another potential good-faith move in 
that recent email to Tom Lane.

I continue to think that it would be better to work together to find a 
common solution, than to insist on one unalterable position.


 > The approach you argue for arbitrarily discriminates too, saying that
 > Germany is more important than Norway or Sweden.

The guideline is not arbitrary; it chooses the most-populous city, in 
this case Berlin. Although every guideline has a bias of some sort, it 
would be a quite a stretch to say that this particular guideline has 
racial, ethnic or national bias, which is the concern here.