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

Philip Paeps philip at trouble.is
Mon Mar 21 11:35:03 UTC 2022


On 2022-03-21 16:31:30 (+0800), Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
> 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.

I agree but I am trying to keep that discussion out of this thread.

>> 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!)

Since the tzdb has been encouraging applications to use zone1970.tab in 
preference to zone.tab since its introduction in 2014, it would be good 
to include this file.

The failure in "make check" is caused by checktab.awk (correctly) 
failing because zones exist in the data files that are not referenced in 
zone1970.tab.

Unfortunately, simply copying zone.tab to zone1970.tab won't work as the 
newer format does not support backward links in the third column (e.g. 
Europe/Mariehamn).  The limitation that a comment can only exist if a 
country has multiple timezones (e.g. Pacific/Pago_Pago) is likely less 
of a problem.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises


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