[tz] Add option to act like global-tz

[Stephen Colebourne]

Hi,
This sounds great! Thanks for taking the time to investigate.

Can you clarify what is generated? As a reminder, the tooling chains
that global-tz supports need the *source* files (africa, europe,
northamerica...) to contain the data for Zone per ISO-3166. This is
because:
- they contain their own parsers of the source data [1] [2] [3]
- the parsers typically operate and expose data in rearguard mode (no
negative DST) [4]
- they consume and expose the last Rule line for each zone [5]

If the source data is available as a result of the make command then
there should be no long term need for global-tz.
If the source data is not available as a result of the make command,
then sadly global-tz would still be needed unless the patch can be
enhanced.

thanks
Stephen

[1] https://github.com/ThreeTen/threetenbp/blob/master/src/main/java/org/threeten/bp/zone/TzdbZoneRulesCompiler.java
[2] https://cldr.unicode.org/development/updating-codes/update-time-zone-data-for-zoneparser
[3] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/make/jdk/src/classes/build/tools/tzdb/TzdbZoneRulesCompiler.java
[4] https://github.com/JodaOrg/global-tz/releases/tag/2022agtz
[5] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base/java/time/zone/ZoneOffsetTransitionRule.html



On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 at 02:19, Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>
> I wangled a bit of free time and wrote the attached proposed patch,
> which adds an option that causes 'make install' to generate time zone
> data (TZif files) that are byte-for-byte identical to what Stephen
> Colebourne's global-tz currently generates. This is done via a few lines
> of awk script. The idea is to give an option to distros that prefer a
> separate Zone per ISO 3166 country, just as we already have build-time
> options for rearguard/vanguard form, TZif truncation, leap seconds, etc.
>
> I haven't installed this in the development database. Comments welcome
> as usual.