<div dir="ltr">I'd be perfectly happy with zdump gaining more display options, but I think there's still huge benefit in deciding on one <i>canonical</i> format for validation. It means that single format can be distributed rather than everyone having to build and run zic themselves, just to get output that can be centrally distributed. (Even if it isn't part of the IANA distribution, I can host that canonical format - not ideal, but better than nothing.) With a to-the-byte canonical format, I'm also happy to put the SHA-1 hashes up.<div><br></div><div>As one point I suspect we could all agree on: assuming there is to be a canonical format, should we use "\n" as the line separator? (My current format uses \r\n, but I think that's likely to cause more pain than it alleviates.)</div><div><br></div><div>Jon</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 28 April 2016 at 18:18, Paul Eggert <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu" target="_blank">eggert@cs.ucla.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">One way forward here would be to give zdump more options to let the user specify the format. That way, everybody could use their own favorite format. One format might look something like this for America/Los_Angeles, assuming the default zdump window of -500 through 2499 CE UTC:<br>
<br>
-501-12-31 16:07:02 -07:52:58 0 LMT<br>
1883-11-18 12:00 -08 0 PST<br>
1918-03-31 03:00 -07 1 PDT<br>
1918-10-27 01:00 -08 0 PST<br>
...<br>
2016-03-13 03:00 -07 1 PDT<br>
2016-11-06 01:00 -08 0 PST<br>
...<br>
2499-03-08 03:00 -07 1 PDT<br>
2499-11-01 01:00 -08 0 PST<br>
<br>
(The "1" and "0" are whether DST is in effect.) This completely characterizes the data and is more compact and easier to read than what zdump outputs now. Other formats might be preferable for other reasons.<br>
<br>
It might also be nice to output "PST8PDT,M3.2.0,M11.1.0" at the end, instead of that repetitive list of lines starting with the year 2007.<br>
</blockquote></div><br></div>