[tz] tabs vs spaces

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Fri May 3 17:50:01 UTC 2013


On May 3, 2013, at 9:54 AM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:

> I guess my main objection is to the recently suggested idea that
> documentation that has always been part of the distribution and which
> has no adequate formally-IANA-approved replacement somehow lacks
> "official standing".

Well, perhaps you're referring to somebody else's suggested idea, but I think it *does* lack "any official standing as *the ultimate* documentation of the time zone database", to use my phrase; it's not as if everything has to be mentioned in Theory, including every term ever used to refer to files in the database, in order to have any validity in any discussion of the database.  Theory does *not* describe the syntax of the time zone data files, nor does it describe the output files generated by zic.

There *is* no single file that is "the ultimate documentation of the time zone database"; there are several.

In addition, as has been noted, RFC 6557 has its own notes on "criteria for updates to the database".

> The solution is to either find a way to prove it has always had official
> standing (the TZ coordinator has continued including these files in the
> release), or to invent a process by which to give it official standing
> (maybe with a quality review and rewrites/reorganization somewhere in
> that process)

I'd like to see some official indication as to what file or files are the documentation.  Whether that involves making a new file, or editing Theory, or splitting it into multiple documents, or moving some or all of the documentation into RFCs, is another matter.




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