[tz] Pedantic correction to Theory regarding size of time zone names

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Sun Jul 16 22:38:45 UTC 2017


Guy Harris wrote:
> 1981 called, they want their UNIX file name limitations back.

tzdb's 14-character limit is like Twitter's 140-character limit: although the 
exact value is a relic of antique technology, the brevity is still worthwhile.

Long ago Unix stored the file under the name "East-Saskatche" and this file was 
accessible by calling 'open' with the name "East-Saskatchewan", so the too-long 
file name still worked well enough for tzdb purposes. Later, some Unix 
maintainers caused these 'open' calls to fail on some platforms, thus breaking 
the name. I doubt whether tzdb users noticed or cared, as they stopped using the 
name years ago.

The maintenance burden of the name Canada/East-Saskatchewan (evidenced partly in 
this thread) appears to be greater than the backward-compatibility benefit of 
keeping the name (as it is a misnomer and is not really used outside of test 
cases). So I'm inclined to comment out its line in "backward". Proposed patches 
attached.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0001-Remove-Canada-East-Saskatchewan-from-backward.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 2263 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20170716/9eb84105/0001-Remove-Canada-East-Saskatchewan-from-backward.patch>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0002-Check-the-14-character-name-length-limit.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 1362 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20170716/9eb84105/0002-Check-the-14-character-name-length-limit.patch>


More information about the tz mailing list