[tz] Beginner's help request

[Zefram]

Daniel Ford wrote:
>So my question now is, how does one know which file to search for zone/rules
>for any given region/city from zone1970.tab?

One doesn't.  Traditionally, one reads all the data source files.
It's a bit tricky to determine automatically which files these are; the
Makefile knows which files to feed to zic, but to get it to hand over
that information requires executing the Makefile with a fully-functional
make(1).  A recent innovation makes it easier, though: the tzdb-*.tar.lz
distro includes a tzdata.zi file, which is in the source format and
includes all of the data.  It's not actually a source file, not including
things like comments, but if you want to automatically process the data
from the source format then it's a sensible starting point.

>And please don't answer 'run such-and-such a program from the code area',

It's not a given that there would be an answer that avoids that sort
of process.  Traditionally we haven't had much concern about direct
users lacking a full-strength coding environment.

-zefram