[tz] timezone DB distribution

[Guy Harris]

On Aug 19, 2020, at 8:41 AM, Paul Gilmartin <PaulGBoulder at AIM.com> wrote:

> On 2020-08-18, at 21:28:09, Guy Harris wrote:
>> 
>> On Aug 17, 2020, at 12:01 PM, Juergen Naeckel via wrote:
>>> 
>>> ...  However…
>>> First of all, a tar.gz is Linux specific.
>> 
>> Or, rather, UN*X specific; Linux Torvalds was about 10 years old when tar was first broadly available (with V7 in 1979, I think), and gzip came out a little more than a year after somebody announced that they were "doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones", although it did support bash and gcc when that announcement was made. :-)
>> 
> ".gz" is non-POSIX. z/OS UNIX doesn't supply a gzip or zip.

Non-POSIX but supplied with many UN*Xes; in practice, *not* supporting it will get in the way of using a lot of source tarballs out there - for that matter, a UN*X supplier is best advised to offer bzip2 and xzip decompression as well, these days.

And does Z/OS UNIX use EBCDIC rather than ASCII?  If so, it may be a UNIX, but it's a UNIX for which a lot of code written for UN*Xes may not work, although the tz code might have avoided making ASCII-specific assumptions.

> And Single UNIX much prefers "pax" over "tar" nowadays.

"prefers" in what sense?  And, in practice, how many pax archives using its extensions to ustar format are out there?

>> ...offering both a tarball and a zipball might be a good idea (zip exists as a UN*X command, and ships with at least UN*Xes, but UN*X users may be less used to it).
>> 
> Again, non-POSIX, but distributed with (most) Linux.

And at least some non-Linux UN*Xes:

	$ which unzip
	/usr/bin/unzip
	$ uname -sr
	Darwin 19.6.0