Please comment on CCTZ bundling

[musicinmybrain]

I see that absl/time/internal/cctz/ contains a partial copy of https://github.com/google/cctz, forked with Abseil-specific changes.

As part of the guidelines for bundling and duplication of system libraries in Fedora Linux, I am required to publicly inquire about a path to supporting an external/system copy of this library.

Is this a future possibility, or will forked-and-bundled CCTZ sources always be required? That’s not a problem, but an opinion from an Abseil maintainer on the matter would be appreciated.

[derekmauro]

If you look at the commit history, at one point we did do just that: af78826

In 2018 the decision was made to bundle the library. I remember being skeptical of the decision at the time. The reasoning was that at Google we really don't use CCTZ directly, we always use it through the Abseil library using Abseil types. It was thought that enough of the functionality of CCTZ would eventually make it into the C++ standard library so that CCTZ could be deprecated.

Anyway, we have no plans to change this decision, but we reserve the right to change our minds.

[musicinmybrain]

Thank you for your response! That’s exactly what I needed.