Re: [Tzdist-bis] [calsify] tzdist and IANA

[Lester Caine <[e-mail]>]

On 18/07/2019 07:02, Eliot Lear wrote:
> While the IANA does a great job at servicing our assigned number needs 
> and delivering the TZ database to developers, they is not set up, nor do 
> they have *any* experience, to handle the load that end clients could 
> place on them.  Moreover, they are in no position to support millions of 
> people if something goes wrong.  And make no mistake: something will go 
> wrong.  I would be okay with a limited tzdist service for those who are 
> going to be distributing the data themselves, but the order of receivers 
> should be on 100s not millions.

The whole basis of the tzdist setup was that it provides a distributed 
means of serving the data. At the top level there is a need for primary 
publishers and since IANA *IS* a primary source then that material does 
need to be published somehow. The ONE think that is important here is 
that any publisher should properly identify the range of data that it is 
providing in addition to being able to service the differences between 
the current version of a rule set and that the client is actively using 
and any later changes. TZDIST is not simply a means of serving a single 
view of the TZ data, it is intended to be able to also provide an 
indication that the rule set that was used initially to normalise data 
has now changed. Bypassing that mechanism by only providing a current 
monolithic dump of the data is not what was intended and is why it is 
based on individual timezone identifiers, and each can be developed 
separately as further historic material becomes available.

We need to at least start to build the seeds of publishers but 
personally I'm not sure IANA is the right starting point since TZ is 
already a truncated data publisher ...

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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