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

[Philip Paeps]

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.

Considering the existence of this fork and the fact that the 
overwhelming majority of users are not affected by the merging of 
pre-1970 time zones, my plan is to merge the tzdata 2022a release into 
supported FreeBSD releases unmodified.  I will create a port of your 
fork which affected/interested users can install, either using the ports 
framework or as a binary package.

Depending on the direction of consensus among other operating system 
distributions, FreeBSD may change the default zoneinfo source at some 
point.  Given that the most controversial changes in 2021b have been 
undone in 2021c, I don't see a pressing need to change to global-tz at 
this time.

> The approach taken is to copy data from backzone and put it back into
> the main files. This recreates tzdb as it would have been had the
> damaging changes since 2014 not been made. The process is *automated*.

This is a good approach.

> Downstream consumers should be able to take the generated source code
> (either from the global-tz branch or the released tar.gz file) and
> consume it as they would have consumed an iana-tz release. Joda-Time
> and threeTen-Backport will be using global-tz going forward.

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.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises