[tz] tzfiles contain Unix epoch for the first transition time

[Ian Abbott]

On 14/08/15 11:25, Robert Elz wrote:
>      Date:        Thu, 13 Aug 2015 16:21:47 +0000
>      From:        Eric Erhardt <Eric.Erhardt at microsoft.com>
>      Message-ID:  <CY1PR0301MB1530174F8E3E98052AD684708E7D0 at CY1PR0301MB1530.namprd03.prod.outlook.com>
>
>    | I've hit a snag with the latest tzdata 2015f.
>
> Aside from what Jon Skeet asked, you should also indicate what you used
> to generate the tz binary files (tzdata only has the source for the info,
> not the binary versions you're obviously looking at - and quite properly
> I think.)  Was it the zic that is with the 2015f sources, or did you use
> some other version, and if so what?  What platform was that running on?

For example, the Debian tzdata maintainer seems to be using an old 
version of zic to generate their tzdata files, as they don't seem to 
have the initial transitions in them (at least in their tzdata-2015f-1 
packages for Debian stretch/sid).

>
>    | This causes the TimeZoneInfo parsing code to throw an exception because it
>    | is assuming these transitions are sorted in ascending order.
>
> That's reasonable, they should be.
>
>    | Is this an intentional change in the tzfiles?
>
> No, what you're seeing is definitely a bug.  The issue is how that
> happened.

If the initial transitions are also missing in Eric's tzfiles, perhaps 
the bug is related to that.

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk> )=-
-=(                          Web: http://www.mev.co.uk/  )=-