Someone I know linked me to this mailing list archive thread:
https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/thread.html#30503
Seems like they're fucking around with timezone data, but he says it's mostly for muh diversity reasons, but I'm too stupid to follow this thread.
It looks like a sane person is trying to fork the modified time DB away into a separate project and leaving the original alone but I'm having a hard time following this entire thread. Anyone know of what's going on?
This is a summary post of the issue written by who appears to be the main objector to the change. It concerns itself with what happens with time zone data prior to 1970, where some city/country specific timezone data was merged in a way that is
On the one hand it doesn't appear to be politically motivated, but on the other hand I don't think it's the sort of change a Norweigan nationalist would make for example.
I'll also say I don't entirely understand some programmers' obsession with making datasets smaller at the expense of accuracy in this modern age. Especially when the datasets are small to begin with. How many people are clamoring for a smaller time zone database?
I have read the threads and determined that there WAS significant political motivation in the patch that is being contended. It is apparent in the defenders' stances when discussing it, such as this one:
The opponents have stuck to technical issues in their opposition of the changes, but the defenders keep bringing up racism to argue for the changes. That's to be expected in the current political climate, only one side is allowed to attack while the other is required to meander about the margins without giving voice to the real problem.
The same person later warns that a fork better "satisfy equity, diversity, and inclusion concerns" as a parting threat.
The same guy is also adding passive-aggressive comments to his patches when he concedes anything to anyone. An example:
This is some serious political hokum.
This reminds me of Ryulong's autism with the GamerGate article...
Well shit. "German Cat" strikes again.
Another choice quote from this character for the road.
This austere individual is deeply, deeply concerned about the fact that he has to defend this aweful racist mess of time zone information that biases sources that were written in researchable locations and archived for posterity. What about Kenya? What about Niger?!
His entire argument is that the non-existence of those sources makes the existence of 'white' sources racist for existing and taking up space in the database he heavily contributed to back when he was a blithering and blind white supremist haplessly promoting the master race with his vile contributions of facts related to calendars.
His big move was to 'streamline' the database by creating a new arbitrary metric for data inclusion and retroactively apply it to the entire set.
He smugly adds:
He's an egomaniac traipsing as a friend of the downtrodden savages he regretfully overlooked before.
An actual solution to this problem would be to improve the database info for Niger and Kenya (and whatever other regions he deemed necessary). He's a professor: he has a large reserve of eager cheap/free labor who would love to take this on as a research project if given the time to do so.
Then again, maybe he's just like the rest of us and doesn't really give a shit about any of this "diversity, inclusion, and equity" stuff and has decided to just pack up and start phoning it in. He's right that this is a liability for his career, and one for which he isn't being paid or have any obligations toward. Better to just follow the commissar and damn the consequences.
Mind you I doubt this is the case because then he wouldn't sound so sanctimonious about it, but if it was I wouldn't blame him. After George Floyd Day was announced at work I started phoning it in too.
when's the last time niger or angola mattered outside of a single headline?
Data has never been more bulky and cumbersome. We may have beefier hardware but that's just allowed everything to bloat up. Scale it out by the number of idiots and how many devices each of them has that connect to a thousand servers a day and suddenly efficiency becomes an issue again. Doubly so now that everything is headed back to mainframe style computing with "the cloud".
That and for those who program everything is just one big optimization puzzle and those who are really good at it tend to be obsessives to begin with, so it's just a natural extension of what they already were.
I'll be the first to agree with you on that. But this is an old library that already has the data structures to handle this sort of complex dataset. To my knowledge no one is complaining that the time zone structure is more complex than it needs to be, because the domain itself is complex. And they haven't removed any of the complexity, they've just shuffled it around to some other part of the library.
Yes. The trick is to know where to fight your battles. But still the obsessives also tend to value correctness. If you're such a time zone nerd that you're maintaining an open source time zone library in your spare time, I would imagine you care about the details. Otherwise you wouldn't be doing it at all.