[tz] [EXT] Re: Uruguay out of DST

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at systematicsw.ab.ca
Tue Jul 14 20:56:17 UTC 2015


On 2015-07-14 13:36, Martin Burnicki wrote:
> Brian Inglis wrote:
>> Large client corps/orgs with a few thousand each Linux, MS, Oracle
>> servers are not a lot faster. Dynamic online tz updates are as desirable
>> for their stability impact as Windows updates ;^>
>>
>> Dynamic online updates are really intended to allow personal clients to
>> accept a certain downside risk and not have to think about updates. Most
>> IT people and groups prefer stability, and while they may automatically
>> download updates, will test and evaluate the risk before applying. Don't
>> see a web source delta distro solving any problems or adding much value,
>> unless vendors see enough downstream support savings to build the
>> download and update process for the binary data, which they have not
>> done yet. Someone may decide to build an app for that.
>
> I think large companies don't have to evaluate updates e.g of the TZ
> data for every single client device.
>
> However, I'd expect that they can set up their own company tzdist
> server, just like they have their company NTP servers today, so the
> company admin just has to take care about their own tzdist server, and
> keep it up to date, and all devices in the company can pull the TZ
> updates from their own local server.
>
> So this eliminates the dependency from external servers, but also
> significantly reduces the effort to update each device manually.

TZdist seems to require a server which tracks changes at zone and impacted
date time range levels (implying also dependencies on rules and aliases).
The server would have to pull apart the current zoneinfo source or
binary files and track when changes happened and what ranges were impacted.
The server returns zone info within changed and impacted date time ranges
of interest to the client in iCalendar, XML, or JSON formats, where the
client then has to decide how to apply these to its data base.

This would allow automated updating for calendar applications but not
obviously for system zoneinfo data, which is the topic of interest,
and would require an iCalendar parser hooked up to part of the zic
compiler.

Seems to provide many extra opportunities for Murphy.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis


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