[tz] Need input - minimal tzdata install

Patsy Griffin patsy at redhat.com
Wed Jul 21 01:16:38 UTC 2021


Hi Paul,

Thanks for the input!

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 4:15 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On 7/19/21 2:42 PM, Patsy Griffin via tz wrote:
> > We are looking at ways to reduce the amount of timezone data needed.
> > Specifically, we are considering providing a minimal/UTC-only tzdata
> > package.
>
> The definition of "minimal" depends on what software you're using. For
> tzcode, the minimal/UTC-only tzdata should be trivial: it's the empty
> set. In other words, install no data files whatsoever. This is because
> tzcode defaults to UTC if nothing is installed. I think glibc behaves
> the same way. If you have some POSIX-compatible library that doesn't
> default to UTC in this way, you can set TZ='UTC0' in the environment.
>

Great!  Defaulting to UTC is perfect.
The Fedora glibc and tzdata package maintainers are working together
towards providing this support.

Perhaps there's some software on your system that doesn't behave the
> same way that tzcode and glibc do, and that doesn't conform to POSIX. If
> so, you could use the following line:
>
> Zone        Etc/UTC         0       -       UTC
>
> as input to zic (or whatever other .zi parser your software is using),
> and then use TZ='Etc/UTC'.
>

Thanks for the example!


> We could add some documentation along those lines, or a Makefile rule to
> generate that one-line file, or something like that; the details would
> depend on what you need.
>
>
Adding the documentation would be great.  At this point, we don't see a
need for Makefile changes but will keep you posted :-)

Thank you,
Patsy
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