[tz] Preparing to fork tzdb

[Paul Eggert]

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>.

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.

Both of these reasons argue against using the draft patches, and argue 
with equal force against using the proposed fork. We'd be better off 
avoiding either approach.

That being said, if the only alternatives are the proposed fork or the 
draft patches, the patches should be better as they should make it 
easier to keep the two approaches coherent. Perhaps the fork could even 
be implemented by a different repository which has a one-line Makefile 
change (I'm just thinking out loud here).