[tz] Extended data format

[Ian Abbott]

On 2013-09-05 18:24, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Ian Abbott wrote:
>> I guess such =zone references should refer to a zone earlier in the same file to keep things simple
>
> But order is not supposed to matter in zic input.
> The man page says "Except for continuation lines,
> lines may appear in any order in the input."
> It's probably better to continue in that tradition,
> even if it's a bit harder to implement.
>
> I think it'd be OK if the new "extended" file is not treated
> as if it could be compiled by itself.  I've often chafed
> at the current approach, where we for example need to copy rules
> from other files into "antarctica"; I'd rather avoid
> copies in the data, as they're harder to maintain.

Rather than extending the current zic format, would it make more sense 
to have a preprocessor that produces files that can be fed to zic or to 
third-party "zic file" parsers?  The preprocessor could pull in rules 
that are shared between files, for example.  It could even do the 
winnowing of data that has been talked about.

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