2011/9/25 Dave Rolsky <[email protected]> > Why borg the Windows and HP-UX code into this distro instead of letting > other maintainers handle this? For Windows, David Pinkowitz has said that > he'd be willing to maintain a DT::TZ::Win32 distro, and we already have a > separate HPUX distro. >
As the author of the HPUX distro, I'm not against an integration in the main DT::TZ. In fact I'm even in favor of it for a few reason: - I published the HPUX distro in 2009 just a few weeks before losing access to an HP-UX system: I have no access to an HP-UX since, so claiming that I'm the maintainer would be an overstatement - the current dependencies between DT::TZ and DT::TZ::HPUX are a mess: see https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=68231 - due to this, DT::TZ::HPUX distro too hard to install, and a better integration would really help - this distribution is 2 years old and we got only two bug reports (RT#68231): this shows that not many people tried to use it on HPUX systems > I think this makes more sense since these maintainers have access to the > relevant systems, and probably have more motivation to keep the code up to > date. > Not the case for HPUX. > If you borg it, you are stuck handling bug reports for systems you don't > really know anything about. > I'm still available for any information about HPUX (as far as I remember from my 2009 work) and there is much information in RT#68231. As far as not automatically recognizing new OS-specific distros, that's fine > since a new distro is an incredibly rare event. > This feature in the previous DT:TZ::Local was helpful to allow me to create the separate HPUX distribution in the first place, and do that quickly without waiting for a patch or an official release. Please note that one important feature of the DT::TZ::HPUX is that it is able to map HPUX timezone ids to Olson ids. This is really helpful to make portable applications that rely only on Olson ids. Parsing tztab would allow to support the timezones exactly as what the base OS supports, but would also probaly break that mapping. Besides that, I have more confidence in the updates of the DateTime::TimeZone distro than in the state of the locally (un)maintained tztab: HP does not seem to publish automated updates, and the HPUX administrators I know seems to avoid to apply any updates anyway. Also systems administators usually only care about UTC and the local timezone, while many applications (in particular web app) need worldwide updated TZ. This difference in concerns make it hard to have an up to date tztab, especially as system administrators have more important things to do than rebuiling tztab by hand (which requires understanding its format). Olivier Mengué (DOLMEN).
