[tz] FW: Beginner's help request

[Daniel Ford]

Howard,

Thank you very much for trying to help with porting your library to Arduino.  But after your recent reply to my trial compilation errors and your suggestions for further steps, I have decided that I would need to be reasonably fluent in C++, plus make major changes to your code, before I would have any hope of getting it to work in the Arduino IDE.

The amount of time required for those tasks would almost certainly exceed the time taken to refine my earlier-proposed strategy of parsing the TZdb text files to ascertain the offset and DST rules for a specified locale, so I'm sorry to say I'm abandoning my attempt to port your library to Arduino.

I've also decided, in the absence of a significant number of TZdb mirror sites, to host the unzipped files on my own server, and maybe some friends' servers too.  Hopefully at least some of those will be around for the lifetime of my clocks!

Regards,
Daniel



-----Original Message-----
From: Howard Hinnant [mailto:howard.hinnant at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2017 7:18 AM
To: Daniel Ford
Cc: tz at iana.org
Subject: Re: [tz] FW: Beginner's help request

It requires a C++11 compiler.  There’s one function: current_zone(), that is highly platform-specific.  I have no idea if the current implementation (e.g. what works for linux) would work on Arduino.  If you’re interested in helping me port to Arduino, I would be interested in accepting patches that made that work.

Howard

On Nov 7, 2017, at 11:38 PM, Daniel Ford <dfnojunk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Oops, looks like I was mistaken.  Howard's library appears to be not (specifically) for Arduino, but a C++ library for Windows (and maybe other) platforms.  Maybe it will compile in the Arduino IDE, though I suspect it will be problematic, if possible at all.
> 
> And I've so far found only one TZdb mirror that keeps a current copy of the data - very disappointing.  It's a shame the whole TZdb scheme is so user-unfriendly.  Quite discouraging.
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Ford [mailto:dfnojunk at gmail.com]
> Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2017 7:03 PM
> To: 'Time zone mailing list'
> Subject: RE: [tz] Beginner's help request
> 
> Woohoo!  I've discovered (and downloaded) an Arduino library, written by Howard E. Hinnant:
> 
> "This timezone library is a complete parser of the IANA timezone database.  It provides for an easy way to access all of the data in this database, using the types from "date.h" and <chrono>.  The IANA database also includes data on leap seconds, and this library provides utilities to compute with that information as well."
> 
> All I need to find now are established TZdb mirrors that keep their copy up-to-date, so I don't overload the master TZdb with queries.  Can anyone point me to any, please?
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
> ---------------
> Daniel Ford (Gerroa, Australia)
> <README.txt>