Time zone confusion and implementation hints

[lennox at cs.columbia.edu]

On Tuesday, July 6 2010, "Yves Goergen" wrote to "tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov" saying:

> On 06.07.2010 04:06 CE(S)T, Robert Elz wrote:
> > When that happens, for sure, zic will deal with it.
> 
> zic deals exactly nothing for me right now. Is there a Windows binary
> available somewhere? Are the generated zic files available? Could
> somebody assist me in building zic for Windows?

zic uses the low-level POSIX file I/O calls (open/read/write) rather than
the high-level C file I/O calls (fopen/fread/fwrite), as well as some APIs
without C equivalents (mkdir) and some POSIX-specific concepts
(link/symlink), so directly porting it to a non-POSIX system without an
emulation layer would probably be a fair amount of trouble.

Fortunately, Cygwin <http://cygwin.com/> provides an excellent POSIX
emulation for Windows, and includes the tzcode binaries (zic and friends)
and the generated tzdata files in its base distribution.

-- 
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs.columbia.edu