[tz] Announcing global-tz - 2022ag (beta)

[Stephen Colebourne]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2022 at 04:57, Philip Paeps <philip at trouble.is> wrote:
> On 2022-03-19 00:00:54 (+0800), Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
> > As regular readers of this list will be aware, there is a long-running
> > dispute about the contents of the IANA time-zone database. (See the
> > list history for details on the dispute).
>
> I have strongly mixed feelings about this fork but I appreciate your
> efforts in trying to resolve the deadlocked dispute.  Thank you.

No problems. From my perspective having done this work, it is obvious
to me that it would be a lot simpler if the auto-generation was in the
other direction. ie. if the main TZDB source files contained all the
relevant data (ie. what global-tz has done), and an automated job
stripped it down to the minimal data set that the tz-corrdinator
desires.

> I don't see a pressing need to change to global-tz at
> this time.

I think we are currently at an unstable equilibrium. The contents of
IANA TZDB discriminate against non-European locations, because there
are essentially two different rules in operation as to what data is
included. global-tz represents one way to solve that issue, by
consistently applying one rule globally. The question distributors
will need to answer is what they want to do once European pre-1970
history is removed from zones that are merged (as distributors are
tacitly accepting the discrimmination of the current unstable
equilibrium).

> The generated global-tz/tzdata omits the zone1970.tab file.  I
> understand that your intended use case has no need for this file but if
> you distribute it, your tzdata tarball would be a drop-in replacement
> for the IANA tzdata tarball.

Hmm. I hadn't intended for the file to be missing from the tar.gz. I
only mentioned it in the automated job as it causes "make check" to
fail. (PRs welcome!)

thanks
Stephen