[tz] Beginner's help request

[Paul Eggert]

Daniel Ford wrote:

> "The intent is that you download the information once, and then resend it to your users."  But this contradicts the statement in README that says: "It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies to time zone boundaries, UTC offsets, and daylight-saving rules."  That infers that users (including all those derivative websites) must *periodically* access the TZdb data

This does not mean that all users must access the iana.org servers directly. 
iana.org is not set up to handle that kind of load! All it means is that users 
should get the data somehow. In practice, Red Hat users get copies of the data 
from Red Hat, Apple users get copies from Apple, and so forth. IANA cannot 
support billions of devices all downloading data directly from IANA.

> "...since you can massage the data before sending it to your users."  I am not set up to send anything, other than posting a piece of hardware (my clock) to a purchaser.

Then I'm afraid you'll need to change your setup. Sorry, but IANA has limited 
resources and it cannot be the direct central server for all the clocks on the 
planet. It should be easy for you or your successors to maintain a server for 
your customers' clocks, a server that is a clone of the IANA server.