[tz] Some thoughts about the way forward

[Paul Eggert]

On 9/23/21 9:00 PM, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
> My chief concern is instability and incompatibility

2021a1 will give you maximum stability and compatibility with 2021a, so 
you can use that if equity is not as much of a concern for you.

> why is it so very, very important to make this change right now

The equity issue has been on the table for months, no other approach has 
been developed or tested, and the only other approaches proposed would 
be less stable and compatible than the already built-and-tested 2021b 
would be.

The equity issue was raised early this year, and we've delayed dealing 
with it for far too long already. Equity is a real issue of concern, and 
it's a bad look for us if we continue with a clearly-inequitable primary 
distribution when a fairer approach has long been implemented and 
available and nothing else is available.

This is mostly a disagreement about maintenance philosophy not end-user 
functionality, as the pre-1970 differences between 2021a1 and 2021b will 
be minor when considered from end users' point of view. We know this 
because we've made similar changes many times in previous releases.

I'll be happy to collaborate on building something that will accommodate 
our philosophical differences in later releases, and have already 
proposed specific (though not-yet-installed) working code that goes a 
long way toward doing that. Having had some experience with writing and 
testing that code, I have confidence that this technical approach will 
succeed if the community wants to work together on this. Of course there 
will be issues - among other things, the 
at-least-one-Zone-per-country-code philosophy is even more 
unstable/incompatible than 2021b will be - but they're clearly solvable.