FW: Java zoneinfo reader

[Paul Eggert]

   Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 13:06:09 -0400
   From: "Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart at bmsi.com>

   Does my proposal sound reasonable?  (High order bits are implied by the
   monotonically increasing values in the transition table).

That won't allow any transitions that are more than 2**32 seconds
apart.  I think this assumption is unsafe.  For example, if Congo
standardizes on Central African Time in 2034, Africa/Kinshasa will
have two adjacent transitions more than 2**32 seconds apart, as its
most recent transition was in early November 1897.

It'd be nicer if we could solve the problem in the more general case.
We need to do this for 64-bit time_t anyway (e.g. 64-bit Solaris 8),
so the problem isn't specific to Java.  We need to extend the compiled
tz file format, ideally in a backward-compatible way.