Bug#1114970: release-notes: Explain tzdata changes from bookworm to trixie
Package: release-notes
Severity: wishlist
During the trixie cycle, the tzdata package reduced the set of timezone
files that it ships, moving many of them to tzdata-legacy on the basis
that the upstream tz project considers them to be for backward
compatibility:
tzdata (2023c-8) unstable; urgency=medium
[...]
* Ship only timezones in tzdata that follow the current rules of geographical
region (continent or ocean) and city name. Move all legacy timezone symlinks
(that are upgraded during package update) to tzdata-legacy. This includes
dropping the special handling for US/* timezones. (Closes: #1040997)
-- Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org> Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:02:14 +0200
People ran into this at the time (#1051973, #1056908), and the response
was to add a NEWS.Debian entry:
tzdata (2023d-1) unstable; urgency=medium
From 2023c-8 on the tzdata package ships only timezones that follow the
current rules of geographical region (continent or ocean) and city name.
All legacy timezone symlinks (old or merged timezones mentioned in the
upstream backward file) were moved to tzdata-legacy. This includes the
US/* timezones.
Please install tzdata-legacy in case you need the legacy timezones or to
restore the previous behavior. This might be needed in case the system
provides timezone-aware data over the network (e. g. SQL databases).
-- Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org> Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:17:33 +0100
That's fine as far as it goes, but
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/09/11/debtz/ points out that it would
be a good idea to mention this in the release notes. I agree: it's the
sort of thing that can cause weird symptoms in various packages after
the upgrade, and if you didn't carefully read through all the
NEWS.Debian entries at the time then you might not think to look in
tzdata for (say) a PostgreSQL problem.
Thanks,
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
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