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

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Fri Apr 8 17:19:32 UTC 2016


On Apr 8, 2016, at 7:33 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

So that a set of diskless workstations with different alignment requirements and byte orders (68k-based, SPARC-based, and x86-based) could share their time zone files on the file server.

(Yes, that is the reason why I contributed the changes to tzcode, back in the 1980's, to use a standard byte order in the files; I was a developer in the OS group at Sun, and the person who picked up the tzdb at Sun, and I knew the Sun386i would be coming out.)


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