As we've just seen with the query about Argentinian timezones, Debian
is liable to package very out-of-date versions of DateTime-TimeZone.
It doesn't have to be this way.  Obviously timezone data is liable to
change quickly, and the regular Debian processes for stability of code
aren't appropriate.  It turns out that Debian do make exceptions to the
usual stability policy for necessarily-volatile packages.  Their tzdata
package is subject to such an exception.

The nature of the exception is an auxiliary package source,
which one has to select specially in /etc/apt/sources.list, in the
same way that one selects security updates.  Up until lenny, this
was managed as a relatively independent "Debian volatile" project
<http://www.debian.org/volatile/>.  From squeeze onwards, it's hosted
on the main package servers.

We should ask for the libdatetime-timezone-perl package to routinely go
the volatile route, the same way the tzdata package does.  I believe
this request should go to the maintainer of the Debian package, the
Debian Perl Group <pkg-perl-maintain...@lists.alioth.debian.org>.  Dave,
I suppose as the DT-TZ maintainer you should make the request.

Assuming that we eventually rewrite DT-TZ to use DT-TZ-Olson, at
that point the subject of the volatility policy would change to
Time::OlsonTZ::Data.

-zefram

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