Re: Updating tzdata freely

[Marius Bakke]

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:

> After creating a special "for tests only" xorg-server package for GTK+'s
> test suite recently, I started thinking about what other packages could
> receive the same treatment.
>
> Tzdata is an important package to keep up to date. Amazingly, some
> governments do announce time zone changes only days or weeks before they
> take effect. Without an up-to-date tzdata, users' clocks will be wrong
> in those locales.
>
> Currently, updating tzdata will cause about 1400 package rebuilds.
> However, if don't use the primary tzdata package in the test suites of
> glib and R, a tzdata update will only cause ~388 rebuilds.
>
> I checked that glib and R do not retain any references to tzdata after
> they are built, so we could create a tzdata package with a "fixed"
> version that will not be updated very often.
>
> So, we could update this package more freely, at the cost of some extra
> complexity in package maintenance.
>
> What do you think?

This sounds good; I was thinking the same after seeing the tzdata update
in core-updates. "libical" still causes a fair amounts of rebuilds, but
it's a lot more manageable than the current 1315 packages :-)

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