[tz] tzcode-2014c breaks applications that use the binary tz files

[lennox at cs.columbia.edu]

On Friday, May 23 2014, "Paul Eggert" wrote to "gunther Vermeir, tz at iana.org" saying:

> gunther Vermeir wrote:
> > just +1 for using the big bang...
> > because "time stamps before then are physically suspect anyway." :)
> 
> Yes, I love this one!  Just yesterday I was talking to an undergraduate 
> UCLA computer science student about cosmological inflation, and now I 
> can go back to him and tell him I squashed a Brazilian time stamp bug 
> with the Big Bang!
> 
> I'm attaching a patch which I've pushed into the experimental 
> repository.  This patch uses a more-justifiable estimate for the time of 
> the Big Bang, namely the Planck+WP+highL+BAO best fit.  I've tested this 
> with the 2014c database and verified that it doesn't change the zdump 
> output.  I've also tested that it works around the GNOME bug for 
> America/Sao_Paulo on Fedora 20 x86-64 (which uses Glib 2.38).
> 
> Comments welcome.  I'd like to generate a new tz version soon, since the 
> GNOME bug is reasonably painful.

My only concern would be whether anything doing GNOME-style behavior then
wants to pass the minimum timestamp to localtime() or the like, which will
fail for timestamps repesenting years earlier than -2^31 - 1900.

-- 
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs.columbia.edu