[tz] Proposal: validation text file with releases

[Jon Skeet]

On 15 July 2015 at 21:29, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

<snip>

       The man page for zic documents the tz
>>        data format, but not in enough detail for a compliant
>> implementation
>>
>
> It'd be helpful to fix that.  Any ambiguities should be clarified (or
> documented as being explicitly ambiguous), as was done in commit
> 2fab66aa164365209e47af24b2337b7c2ffdbe5c.  This shouldn't require a
> complete rewrite.


Righto - I wasn't sure whether the intention was that the man page was
complete in a specification sense, or more providing general guidance. I
think it's clear in the vast majority of cases - it's only corner cases
where I've found myself wondering how to interpret the rules.

I brought it up mostly as it was the motivation for needing regression
tests, but I think we should separate the work. Obviously the burden is on
me to be clear about exactly where and how I'm having problems. Would you
prefer that I report my confusion on the list, or by direct mail?


>  If modifying zdump to add
>> an extra flag is deemed an appropriate course of action, do we have any
>> volunteers to do so?
>>
>
> I can volunteer to change zdump but it's not clear yet what needs to be
> changed.  First we'd need to design a good format for regression testing,
> and document that format.  This hasn't been done yet, and will take some
> thinking.  Existing format proposals haven't ensured that the zdump output
> should contain everything visible to the API.
>

Right - as a non-API user, I'm mostly in the dark here. The proposal I've
implemented on my github repo is very much to scratch my particular itch,
and was mostly to make a start so that we could improve it.

Is there any information missing on an individual transition basis, or is
it more global matters (links, start/end points, range of transitions) that
is missing information?

Jon
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