Updating tzdata freely

[Leo Famulari]

After creating a special "for tests only" xorg-server package for GTK+'s
test suite recently, I started thinking about what other packages could
receive the same treatment.

Tzdata is an important package to keep up to date. Amazingly, some
governments do announce time zone changes only days or weeks before they
take effect. Without an up-to-date tzdata, users' clocks will be wrong
in those locales.

Currently, updating tzdata will cause about 1400 package rebuilds.
However, if don't use the primary tzdata package in the test suites of
glib and R, a tzdata update will only cause ~388 rebuilds.

I checked that glib and R do not retain any references to tzdata after
they are built, so we could create a tzdata package with a "fixed"
version that will not be updated very often.

So, we could update this package more freely, at the cost of some extra
complexity in package maintenance.

What do you think?

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature