Re: timezone data packaged separately and in volatile?

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>]

On Thu, 02 Feb 2006, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
> I just realised that the timezone data in glibc is taken from an
> upstream database (namely ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/). This data
> sometimes changes, more rapidly than our release cycle (and than any
> release cycle we can reasonable have).

See the tz-brasil package for the current solution we have for the problem
of widely variable timezones.  Brazil's tz gets updated in unpredictable
ways, sometimes more than twice a year and with little prior notice.

That package is far from perfect (I personally don't agree with a lot of
what it does), but it might give you a few ideas.

Bottom line: you do not need to package the timezones in volatile.  You can
also have the timezones available from download, and a normal, stable
package that downloads that data, validates it, and applies it.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh