[tz] timezone DB distribution

[Michael Douglass]

On 9/7/20 17:24, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 9/7/20 1:23 PM, Brian Inglis wrote:
>> If you follow those links and dig into those servers, they appear to 
>> be mail
>> server calendar addins, which use vzic to convert tzdata source into 
>> VTIMEZONEs,
>> for updating and caching calendar zones, not providing any kind of 
>> service or
>> distribution, except to their own mail server calendar clients.
>
> Thanks for following those links, which I didn't bother to do. If they 
> don't support the TZDIST protocol then I suppose I should revert the 
> recently-proposed change to tz-links.html[1] which says they do.

No - neither bedwork nor Darwin have any mail element - they are 
calendar and contacts servers. Both bedework (which I'm responsible for) 
and Cyrus (for which Ken is responsible) support TZdist.

There is code in both to convert tzdata source - mine is partially 
working - Ken's is in much better shape.

The reason VTIMEZONE was the only supported data format is it was the 
only one defined at the time. That's why Ken started the TZif definition 
so that TZDIST could deliver the data used by OSs for example.

TZDIST is not data format specific. It's just that at this stage there 
aren't may defined formats.

I can't speak for Cyrus but the tzdist server in bedework is a separate 
project in github. I can add a direct link

>
> [1] 
> https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/cb2d288ae0bb3aa5fb7cc94480ea955ff76bd183