Hi all, As some of you may know, Zefram (aka Andrew Main), died recently. I don't know any details beyond what was shared on the p5p list - https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2025/03/msg269672.html
Zefram maintained quite a few CPAN distros - https://metacpan.org/author/ZEFRAM If you take a look at this list you'll see quite a few that are date & time-related. There are a few in particular I want to discuss. The first is Time-OlsonTZ-Data (https://metacpan.org/dist/Time-OlsonTZ-Data). This is basically the _compiled_ IANA timezone DB files packaged as a Perl module. Zefram had some sort of automation which would detect a new IANA DB release. This would then automatically create a new version of this distro and upload it to CPAN. This was still working a few days after his death, but I assume that eventually it will stop. This data distro in turn is used by DateTime-TimeZone-Olson ( https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime-TimeZone-Olson). This is a DateTime-TimeZone replacement that uses the data packaged in the other distro. *All of this is to say, if you are using DateTime-TimeZone-Olson, it will probably stop getting data updates in the near future!* I suggest looking at DateTime-TimeZone-Tzfile ( https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime-TimeZone-Tzfile) as a replacement. This also uses the compiled IANA TZ DB files, but it uses the ones installed on the system. If you're running on any sort of modern Unix, it should have an up to date version of this. Typically, this is some sort of distro package. For example, in Debian/Ubuntu, this is called "tzdata". You can also use DateTime-TimeZone, but if you're not using it already, you probably have a good reason. If you're feeling ambitious, you can contact pa...@perl.org and ask to take over some Zefram's distros. It would be great if someone could take over Time-OlsonTZ-Data and provide the same automated uploads. Part of this is implemented by https://metacpan.org/dist/Time-OlsonTZ-Download and some of the rest is in the Time-OlsonTZ-Data distro. I think the `prebuild` script in that latter distro does the work of actually compiling the TZ DB. However, AFAICT, Zefram never publicly shared his repos for anything he created, and I suspect there's some part of this automation (like setting up the system, crontab, etc.) that is just lost forever. So there's some amount of work left to tie this all back together. Cheers, Dave Rolsky http://blog.urth.org https://github.com/autarch
