FW: New home for time zone stuff by 2012?

Paul Schauble Paul.Schauble at ticketmaster.com
Fri Aug 28 05:05:36 UTC 2009


Paul Koning writes
> XML is a nice and flexible interchange format.  It usually isn't very 
> efficient but probably efficient enough.  It also is very bulky
compared 
> to the current format.  Again, consider embedded systems.  In a system
I 
> work on, we can't possibly store the current tzdata format in full,
let 
> alone what it would look like if expressed in XML.  We solved that by 
> modifying the tz compiler to omit any historic data prior to V1.0,
since 
> the nature of this product is that it never has to show times
predating
> its release.  With that change, the data fits (it shrinks down to less
200
> kbytes, which is acceptable.

Perhaps you missed the point. Your embedded system would not store the
XML any more than it now stores the full text distribution with all
comments. You now store a compiled form of the distribution text; in the
future you would store a compiled form of the XML distribution.

I think there are more plusses than minuses in going to XML.
Particularly if an XML or RELAX NG schema is also distributed. It would
probably be necessary to have a converter from XML back to the current
format, but that should not be a problem.

    ++PLS
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