[tz] 2016c on illumos - problems with new Russia entries

[Paul_Koning at dell.com]

> On Apr 8, 2016, at 10:33 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2016, at 06:56, Ian Abbott wrote:
>> I'd just treat them as warnings.  The version of zic from 2015f onwards 
>> doesn't warn about these lines.
>> 
>> In the future, once sufficient installations of zic have been upgraded, 
>> numeric abbreviations like '+04' in the input files will be replaced by 
>> '%z' and zic will automagically generate the numeric abbreviations.
> 
> You know, I've occasionally wondered what's the point of having a
> standard binary format (which has a performance cost compared to having
> one that uses platform-specific alignment and endianness) if you're not
> going to actually ship binary files.

It's there if you want to use it.  The tzdata are useful to everyone, whether they use zic or not, whether they use the supplied zic or some other.

If you don't like the binary format, you're free to make your own.  If you want to avoid the design effort and don't mind the trivial performance hit, you can use the standard.

	paul