ICU data package is grossly outdated

[AnrDaemon]

The data package compiled into supplied ICU libs is extremely out of date.
I.e. the timezone information in libicu52 (Ubuntu 14) is as old as 2013g.
The "newest" shipped tzdata in Bionic is 2017c, which is about as "new" as the one in Trusty.
Means, pretty much rotten by now.

It wouldn't be so hard to override it with env. vars, if not for applications, which intentionally clear environments at startup. F.e. PHP FPM.

[Steven R. Loomis (srl-icu-project)]

Hi. ICU tz data is kept available such as https://github.com/unicode-org/icu-data/tree/master/tzdata/icunew/2018e/44 ( look in the le / be / ee for different endianness, ee is ebcdic ) . It could be rebuilt into an updated icu package. Or, it could be side loaded (as a separate data file loaded at runtime).

[AnrDaemon (anrdaemon)]

Yes, I'm well aware it could be rebuilt. Do you suggest me taking over the maintenance and rebuild it for you?

[Steven R. Loomis (srl-icu-project)]

@anrdaemon not sure what you mean. ICU itself doesn't cut a release every time there's a timezone update.