[tz] 2021b v 2021a1

[Paul Eggert]

On 9/24/21 9:16 AM, John Hawkinson wrote:
> So again, why would we not do this? What interest does it serve to do otherwise?

Unfortunately I haven't had time to answer each individual message.

The brief answer to your question is that it is relatively urgent for us 
to address the equity issue.

So far this issue has been mostly limited to this mailing list, but it's 
almost sure to come out in the popular press, as the recent flurry of 
messages has caused outsiders to pay attention to the issue. (I know 
this because they're contacting me privately.)

I don't want the resulting headlines to cast aspersions on IANA, on the 
contributors to this discussion, or on the immediate consumers of the 
database. We need to show that we're addressing the equity problem. This 
means shouldn't continue to come out with new releases without doing 
anything about a real equity issue that we've known about for several 
months.