[tz] Version in zoneinfo files?

Goudge, Stephen stephen.goudge at petards.com
Mon Feb 13 10:39:51 UTC 2017


> -----Original Message-----
> From: tz-bounces at iana.org [mailto:tz-bounces at iana.org] On Behalf Of
> Nathan Stratton Treadway
> Sent: 10 February 2017 03:54
> To: tz at iana.org
> Subject: Re: [tz] Version in zoneinfo files?
> 
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 17:59:23 -0500, Arthur David Olson wrote:
> > The fifteen "reserved for future use" bytes near the start of time
> > zone binary files are too few for this purpose (take
> > "America/New_York"--and cue
> 
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 17:37:53 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > On 02/09/2017 04:44 PM, Steven R. Loomis wrote:
> > >>>There are political objections to some of the zone names, so
> > >>>putting them in the data files might raise a few eyebrows.
> > >Wouldn't the names have been filenames elsewhere on disk, somewhere
> > >in the "zoneinfo" directory?
> >
> > Not in some installations. Android, I think, does not create filenames
> > like "America/New_York". More important, these names are not part of
> > the format now, and standardizing them in the format would increase
> > the likelihood of causing political irritations. And
> 
> I am pretty sure it wouldn't be the best solution to the overall set of goals
> being discussed in this thread, but just in case it inspires better ideas I'll
> throw the following thought into the ring:
> 
> It occured to me that a way to avoid putting these zone names into the data
> file itself yet still have the data file be "uniquely" identified would be to have
> some process (hash?) come up with a unique, shorter-than-15-byte
> identifier for each zone, which could then be placed in in the existing
> "reserved for future use" field in the data file.
> 
> 
> 						Nathan
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Nathan Stratton Treadway  -  nathanst at ontko.com  -  Mid-Atlantic region
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FWIW For a number of years I have been using a simple scheme where we have a short integer that is used as a TZ id - in an embedded environment, we record data samples with a UTC timestamp plus this id number. When the data is displayed we use a simple table, indexed directly by the short integer, to look up the full-length TZ name and display the local time when & where the data was recorded.

There should be enough space in the "reserved for future use" fields to store a short and then provide the mapping table as a separate file.

I've mentioned this idea a couple of times in the past, e.g. http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-March/018707.html and, if there was interest, would tidy up the table & code and make it available. The big problem with this scheme is that there are problems when zones are deleted - as happened in tzdata2011m when Europe/Tiraspol vanished

Regards,

Stephen Goudge
Senior Software Engineer


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