[tz] timezone DB distribution

[Ken Murchison]

On 9/7/20 11:06 PM, Michael Douglass wrote:
>
>
> On 9/7/20 19:43, Tim Parenti wrote:
>> A reasonable criterion for inclusion should probably be whether the 
>> service makes the protocol accessible for arbitrary consumption, 
>> whether openly or by authenticated subscription.
>>
>> The phrase "supports TZDIST" can of course mean several 
>> different things, but while there are benefits to using the protocol 
>> internally to a product, I don't think this fulfills the expectation 
>> that it would tend to evoke here. From the perspective of someone 
>> reading tz-link.html, it's much more important to answer "where are 
>> some public tzdist servers I can point my project to?" rather than 
>> "what's something that happens to speak tzdist to its own clients?" 
>> (The latter, frankly, is of little relevance to consumers of the tz 
>> project data.)
>
> We implemented (and use) those servers to provide a starting point. 
> Having a service requires some infrastructure maintained by some body 
> or consortium. I believe Ken's server fully supports tzdist (and 
> beyond). Mine may be a little out of date but supports pretty much the 
> latest.
>

The tzdist module in Cyrus should be completely up to date with RFC 7808 
and will return RFC 8536-compliant TZif data when requested.  It can 
also spit out zdump formatted data, which I used for debugging.

Making this a stand-alone service would take a lot of work since it uses 
the built-in httpd server and shares a lot of I/O handling APIs with 
imapd, etc.

-- 

Kenneth Murchison
Senior Software Developer
Fastmail US LLC