[tz] Getting close to new release: testing, testing, ...

Clive D.W. Feather clive at davros.org
Thu Sep 12 02:35:52 UTC 2013


>> I don't think there's any pressing need to do this, but it has its
>> attractions.  If we do work on an incompatibly different file format, it
>> should be a long-term project to produce a format to serve for the next
>> 30 years, not a hasty process that we'd need to redo.

Agreed. And I don't think we should be sacrificing clean design for any
kind of compatibility.

> I had been thinking about a PNG-like "chunk" structure  which would
> allow implementations to ignore anything they don't understand. I
> thought about proposing this back when we were talking about
> tz-to-metazone mapping (something which I still think should belong to
> this project rather than CLDR). That would take care of future
> extensibility.

What's wrong with XML. Parsers are easy to obtain. The code that interprets
the structure can ignore any entity they don't understand, giving complete
extensibility. Or you can have a specific entity:

    <mandatory type="abc"> ... </mandatory>

which means "if you don't know what an 'abc' is, raise an error now rather
than trying to understand the contents".

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather          | If you lie to the compiler,
Email: clive at davros.org     | it will get its revenge.
Web: http://www.davros.org  |   - Henry Spencer
Mobile: +44 7973 377646


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