[tz] Fwd: Bulletin C number 58

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at SystematicSw.ab.ca
Mon Jul 29 23:03:46 UTC 2019


On 2019-07-29 08:03, Judah Levine via tz wrote:
>    I have removed the trailing spaces that you noticed and the new files
> are now posted at both ftp locations. With all due respect and with no
> offense intended, I suggest that software that is sensitive to trailing
> whitespace should be re-considered.
>    The comment lines are intended to be helpful for any poor soul who is
> not familiar with the various time formats and the definition of leap
> seconds. I consider that stuff to be helpful explanations and not data.
> The point of making them comments is that they could be easily ignored
> by the usual software that parses scripts and by users who understand
> all of the strange and wondrous details of UTC.
>    I designed the two "special" comment lines so that they could be
> found by reading the first two characters on every line in the file
> without parsing every line. Also, they would not have to be at any
> special line number in the file. I did not invent this idea -- UNIX
> scripts use the same method to identify the shell. For example, a script
> that did not care about the checksum could ignore that value without any
> special processing.
>    I invented the file format in the dark ages based on what I thought
> would be useful at the time. I will *consider* improvements or changes
> with the understanding that the file is used on many different and
> incompatible operating systems. Any "improvement" that breaks this
> requirement is unlikely to be useful.

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"
	-- RFC 1122, Robustness Principle: Postel's Law, Jon Postel

Git check-in hooks for such issues should either be warnings, or configured to
ignore all upstream sources: you should always be able to check in upstream
sources as is.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains
too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised.


More information about the tz mailing list