all messages for Guix-related lists mirrored at yhetil.org
 help / color / mirror / code / Atom feed
From: Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>
To: 63006@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: [bug#63006] Time zone database improvements
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2023 16:59:41 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ZEL5PdiZbj243ZRD@jasmine.lan> (raw)

Currently, almost the entire distro is rebuilt when we need to update
the time zone database, tzdata.

We need to do this a few times a year, and it doesn't make any sense for
packages to keep a static reference to this database which will be out
of date in a few months.

Instead, they should look up the time zones at run-time, which most
programs that actually use time zones do.

These patches start improving the situation.

Libical has committed a fix for this almost 5 years ago, but still
hasn't released it, so we cherry-pick Nix's patch:

https://github.com/libical/libical/issues/350

Go wants to embed a copy of the database in case one cannot be found.  I
don't see why having an incorrect time zone is better than no time
zones, so here's a patch to remove the embedded copy.

And after those two changes, we are able to update tzdata to the current
version.

We have more work to do to remove or replace python-pytz, which
unfortunately contains its own embedded copy of the database and a few
thousand dependents. Luckily, it seems that Python 3.9 has made pytz
obsolete:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DeprecatePytz#Deprecate_pytz

And there are still some small reverse dependency graphs of packages
that mistakenly depend on tzdata.




             reply	other threads:[~2023-04-21 21:00 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-04-21 20:59 Leo Famulari [this message]
2023-04-21 21:01 ` [bug#63006] [PATCH 1/3] gnu: libical: Find the time zone database in the environment Leo Famulari
2023-04-21 21:01   ` [bug#63006] [PATCH 2/3] gnu: Go: Do not depend on tzdata Leo Famulari
2023-04-21 21:01   ` [bug#63006] [PATCH 3/3] gnu: tzdata: Update to 2023c Leo Famulari
2023-04-30 21:00 ` [bug#63006] Time zone database improvements Ludovic Courtès

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=ZEL5PdiZbj243ZRD@jasmine.lan \
    --to=leo@famulari.name \
    --cc=63006@debbugs.gnu.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this external index

	https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git

This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.