[tz] Proposal: validation text file with releases

[Guy Harris]

On Jul 15, 2015, at 1:00 PM, Jon Skeet <skeet at pobox.com> wrote:

>> On 15 July 2015 at 20:23, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
>>> On Jul 15, 2015, at 3:10 PM, Jon Skeet <skeet at pobox.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> If the tzdata isn't really intended to be consumed - if we should really only consume the zic output, and anything else is somewhat questionable, then why distribute the tzdata at all? Why not just distribute the zic output files?
>> 
>> For the same reason that people distribute source files and not compiled binaries.
> 
> Where distribution of program binaries is feasible, it tends to make life simpler for those consuming it. In my experience, most end users of software don't build it from scratch these days, even on platforms where that used to be the norm such as Linux. While source code tends to compile to different binaries on different platforms, there's no reason for the zic output not to be made entirely portable (if indeed it isn't already)

The data is stored in big-endian form (done so that it could be shared over NFS by big-endian Sun-2, Sun-3, and Sun-4 machines and little-endian Sun386i machines), and uses standard lengths (the tzdata(5) man page uses "long" in structure definitions, but that's more informative than normative; it also explicitly speaks of "four-byte" values, and that's what's normative), so it should be portable to all 8-bit-byte two's-complement machines (other machines are on their own reading them).

(I'll update the man page to be less C-on-ILP32-platform-oriented.)