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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


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