[tz] Single source of truth for timezone data

enh enh at google.com
Thu Dec 8 21:58:10 UTC 2022


On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 12:50 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On 2022-12-08 05:24, Almaz Mingaleev wrote:
>
> >> > new timezone abbreviation "XYT", downstream distros like Ubuntu can
> >> > immediately ship the new P without waiting for i18n updates. P will
> >
> >
> > It is not a problem if a distro ships it, it is a problem if this new
> stuff
> > leaks
> > to the external world.
>
> Sorry, I'm not following. When Ubuntu ships a new tzdata package then
> surely that has "leaked" to the outside world?
>
>
> > It would be naive to expect from a user base of a
> > service
> > to have up-to-date time zone data even after a month after TZDB release.
>
> In the past I've gotten my Ubuntu systems updated within 24 hours of a
> tzdata release, simply by applying patches as usual from Ubuntu. But as
> Benjamin indicates, this is not happening with 2022g. I just now checked
> for updates and I'm still stuck on 2022f. So from my point of view,
> Ubuntu is slow in this case - instead of taking less than a day, it's
> taking more than a week.
>
>
> > being consistently wrong about _new_ changes is better
> > than having different answers within the platform.
>
> As a Ubuntu user, I'd prefer tzdata to be up-to-date even though ICU is
> out-of-date, over having both tzdata and ICU out-of-date. Of course
> Ubuntu differs from Android in that most apps use tzdata not ICU. Still,
> I'm a bit curious what end-user-visible problems would occur on Android
> and/or Ubuntu if tzdata leads ICU slightly. I know you've seen problems,
> but were they end-user problems or just test-case problems? On Ubuntu
> various other copies of tzdata (e.g., Python's) can be slightly out of
> date too, but this doesn't seem to be much of an issue.
>

(it's been years since i was responsible for this, but unlike the folks
who've owned it since, i'm in the same time zone as you, so i'll share my
anecdata anyway...)

i think i've seen two different variants: "app A doesn't match app B" and
"the app doesn't match the clock at the top of the screen provided by the
system". "two different parts of app A don't match each other" ought to be
possible, but i don't think i've seen that one in practice, presumably
because developers tend to be consistent about what languages/APIs they're
using.

thanks to work from some of the aforementioned folks over in Europe/London,
there should be fewer mismatches today, as more stuff (including at least
one platform API) has been moved over to icu.


> > It is not translations that we are waiting for, but changes like [1
> > <https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/pull/2261/files>]. Recent
> > time zone changes were short notice ones and ICU team (thanks Yoshito and
> > others!)
> > did these changes very quickly.
>
> Thanks, I didn't know that.
>
> Here's a timeline I see for the latest Mexico change:
>
> * 2022-11-28 17:00 UTC - news article published announcing the change
> (which is not official yet, I think)
> <
> http://puentelibre.mx/noticia/ciudad_juarez_cambio_horario_noviembre_2022/
> >
>
> * 2022-11-29 03:55:31 UTC - tz mailing list notified
> <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-November/032365.html>
>
> * 2022-11-29 17:42:29 UTC (14 hours after notification) - tzdb 2022g
> announced
> <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2022-November/000076.html>
>
> * 2022-11-29 18:23:41 UTC (less than an hour after tzdb 2022g
> announcement) tzdata 2022g-r0 released for Alpine Linux
> <https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86/tzdata>
>
> * 2022-11-30 07:06 UTC (7 hours after tzdb 2022g announcement) - tzdata
> 2022g-1 released for Arch Linux
> <https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/tzdata/>
>
> * 2022-12-01 03:08:08 UTC (33 hours after tzdb 2022g announcement) -
> abovementioned ICU patch committed
>
> * 2022-12-01 12:38:06 UTC (9 hours after ICU patch committed) - Ubuntu
> patch committed
> <https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/2022g-0ubuntu0.22.10.1>
>
> * 2022-12-05 (4 days after ICU patch committed) - Red Hat Enterprise
> Linux fix available to users
> <https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2022:8785>
>
> * 2022-12-07 (6 days after ICU patch committed) - Android patch
> committed
> <
> https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/timezone/+/ea3e0ece71974c1df741b1b0d7789682d6d40dea
> >
>
> * now (a week after ICU patch committed) - my Ubuntu workstation is
> still not updated.
>
> We should be able to do better than this; that is, be more like Alpine
> or Arch Linux, or at least more like RHEL (though I see that Fedora
> still hasn't released 2022g...). Though ICU is part of the problem (as
> is tzdb itself :-), most of the delay seems to be occurring even after
> ICU patches are applied.
>
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