Updating tzdata freely

Updating tzdata freely

[Leo Famulari]

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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?

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Re: Updating tzdata freely

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> 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?

I think it’s a good idea.

‘guile-2.0/fixed’ in (gnu packages guile) was introduced for the same
reason.

Ludo’.

Re: Updating tzdata freely

[Marius Bakke]

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Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> 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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Re: Updating tzdata freely

[Leo Famulari]

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On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 07:14:55PM +0100, Marius Bakke wrote:
> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
> > 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.
> 
> 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 :-)

Yes, it will be a lot more manageable!

I pushed these changes as 3ffaec136fab017e6cc094287da207cf30f05974.

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