[tz] Proposal: validation text file with releases

Steffen Nurpmeso sdaoden at yandex.com
Wed Jul 15 12:45:33 UTC 2015


Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> wrote:
 |On 15 July 2015 at 06:09, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
 |> Stephen Colebourne wrote:

 |> Although it is an issue, the DST-vs-STD offsets are implementation details
 |> that are neither exposed by the reference API nor exported to zic's output
 |> files. Any values they internally have were not intended \
 |> to be visible when
 |> the tzdata entries were written.
 |
 |I think what Jon is asking, and I'm confirming, is that this data
 |*should* be considered part of the public data exposed by the tzdb
 |project. Noda, Joda and JSR-310 all use it, no doubt other do to. It
 |is very reasonable and useful info. The key point being that we don't
 |just care about what the offset is, but also how that offset is
 |calculated.

We were using this information as it has been a vivid part of the
TZ data one and half a decade ago as a signed save_secs field to
be added to signed utf_offsec [1].  The information is still in
there; i am not ._.; otherwise an official statement on that data
i would appreciate, too.

What would be an issue to me is instead that TZDIST doesn't offer
a binary representation but only (iCalendar,) JSON and XML, which
require parser libraries, whereas with CBOR the IETF standardizes
a wonderful, extensible and otherwise future-proof binary format
that also has been designed with easy JSON mapping in my mind.
And especially the more simple JSON/xy libraries read anything
into memory before text parsing starts.  Just my one cent.
Ciao,

  [1] http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-June/018002.html

--steffen


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