[tz] Getting close to new release: testing, testing, ...

[Lester Caine]

Zefram wrote:
>> What's wrong with XML.
> It's hideously verbose; it doesn't actually provide a representation
> of the data (it only provides structure); it has awkward corners that
> end up poorly tested; as it's a textual format it's subject to all the
> usual problems around character sets; the context encourages the use of
> forgiving parsers for the actual textual data representation, which leads
> to incompatibility; and it's a bad design in the first place because it
> tries to tackle too many classes of job.

Seconded.
XML has a place in passing material between systems, but as a general store it's 
simply wrong. OSM was originated as 'xml' but the raw data is now in a binary 
file format to cut the flab.

I am looking at creating an SQL database with the current data in, which can 
also then have a built in history of changes to that data. This will allow 
filtering in several ways, such as number of timezones on a particular date, and 
history of the 'creation' of data for a particular timezone can be displayed. 
Outputting a current clean set of data could then be in any format as required 
and providing a base to then hang the 'evidence' as additional records which can 
be displayed as html pages.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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