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Re: [PATCH] Add --disable-timezone configure option
On Tue, 14 Feb 2012, Roland McGrath wrote:
> I think somebody should make such a package, either by making a new GNU
> package that tracks the upstream data reliably, or by contributing to the
> upstream tz folks, and maintaining thereafter, a configure script and
> whatever other changes are necessary to make it so that something directly
> distributed upstream is GNU-compatible. When that's been done, we can drop
> the data from glibc's make install. (In the meantime, it would be easy and
> painless to update our data.)
I'm not sure there's much benefit to actually having a package include
copies of the data rather than having a --with- argument pointing to where
the data files may be found. By using --with, the package would only need
updating pretty infrequently (and people generally want minimal latency
when getting tzdata updates).
(It's also not clear all such split-out things need to be entirely
separate GNU packages, as opposed to separate tarballs made from separate
repositories but under the overall auspices of glibc - much like ports has
its own repository and a different, overlapping set of people working on
it, but isn't separate at the GNU level. Though there isn't really any
strong glibc connection in the tzdata case.)
> then it is liable to bit-rot. So at the least we should add an
> item to a release-time checklist for making sure our test suite is
> adequately representative of all the tz data files out in the world with
> which we mean to be compatible.
The format hardly ever changes - the only change I recall having been on
the tz list since 1997 is the addition of support for 64-bit times (done
in a backwards compatible way - new data added after the old data). So we
can put this on the checklist, and I'm happy to confirm every six months
the absence of changes to the format - but it will pretty much always just
be again confirming that the format didn't change.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com