Hi Michael,
> The upstream man-pages package contains tzfile.5 and tzselect.8 manual > pages, and I am guessing that these are shipped by Debian. No, only tzfile.5. Debian ships its own version of tzselect.8. > Checking ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub, I see that... > the tzfile.5 page at elsie contains new info that isn't in the > man-pages version of this page. > At this stage, I am not sure whether the correct course of action for > me upstream is > a) Remove tzfile.5 and tzselect.8 from the man-pages > b) Update the tzfile.5 page in man-pages... > it requires verifying that the tzfile.5 changes correspond to current glibc > reality. > c) Do nothing. Obviously it's up to you, but if you decide on (b), I think you're OK with updating tzfile.5. The newer version is completely backward compatible - it describes both Version 1 format and Version 2 format zoneinfo files. So even on systems that don't support Version 2 yet, the man page is correct and useful. And even the most stable systems are likely to upgrade, because otherwise their timezone information will be out of date; live zoneinfo files are shipping in Version 2 format now. As for bitrot, this man page seems to change about once every decade or two, and even then the upstream authors are likely to continue being zealous about backwards compatibility due to the nature of this system. For Debian, the right thing to do technically is to move this man page to the tzdata or glibc package, but in practice I doubt it's worth the effort. So it would be kind of you to continue to support it upstream. Thanks much, Yitz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
