[tz] Policy Suggestion: Minimum time period betwen releases

[John Sauter]

On Mon, 2023-03-27 at 20:37 +0300, Ali Al Amine via tz wrote:
> The problem is that currently this database is expected to change
> immediately, as well as vendors are expected to release asap (no
> expectations, just asap). Having a clear, structured release
> timeline, and rules that would structure such a mess, would remove
> the risk of such a thing to happen in the future (or at least it
> would attempt to organize it). Howard's or my suggestions are trying
> to setup such a structure. 
> 
> @Rany Yes but that's why there should be a minimum of some sort, a
> minimum that has a leeway in adding the tz database, as well as for
> the vendors to update. That way all updates are synchronized as
> expected by the time people go forward with the change.
> 
> @Deborah I'm from lebanon, and this is how institutions worked with
> it with such a short notice: 
> - Banks didn't go forward with the change with international
> transactions as to not have confusion with the transactions with the
> international banks and their systems
> - Apps that rely on cloud providers (like our case) didn't know what
> to work with as the vendors cannot update on the fly. We contacted
> AWS for our case as an example and what they told us is that there is
> no timeline for when the update would happen, so we need to change
> our codebase to take both into consideration as it might happen at
> any time and our code should handle the inconsistencies that appear.
> - Systems that rely on 3rd party vendors (for example quickbooks for
> accounting, or any software the businesses are relying on) are
> reporting everything in the wrong date as they didn't update, and
> they also don't have a timeline for when the update will happen.
> 
There is nothing that IANA can do to solve the problems you are
describing.  You need to push back on the politicians--explain to them
that their decision-making procedures are causing harm to their people.
Ask them, not IANA, to give enough time between the announcement of
such a policy and its effective date that updates can be synchronized.
    John Sauter (John_Sauter at systemeyescomputerstore.com)
-- 
get my PGP public key with gpg --locate-external-keys
John_Sauter at systemeyescomputerstore.com

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