[tz] Proposal: validation text file with releases
Paul Eggert
eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Wed Jul 15 14:53:12 UTC 2015
Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> 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.
When I wrote that data, I didn't worry about the DST-vs-STD offset. I cared
only about the correctness of the sum of the offset and standard time, because I
knew that only the sum mattered. At this point it would be a nontrivial project
to verify that these offsets actually make sense everywhere in tzdata. (They
usually do, but in some cases I vaguely recall that there were issues.) Until
such a project is done (and I'm not volunteering :-) it would be misleading to
document that the offsets are meaningful.
There are many ways in which tzdata source code can differ in appearance while
meaning the same thing. For example, although a time can be written "1:00" or
"01:00" or "1:00:00" or "+1:00", none of this matters in zic output. This sort
of thing is intended to be obvious, but unfortunately it was not obvious in this
case.
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