I suspect this is just a matter of how the data has been specified, but it's a little odd... I'm looking at the output of zic for each zone, and almost all zones start with a "transition" for some timestamp in the long distant past - including fixed zones such as UTC and Etc/*. However, the legacy "root" zones of CET, EET, PST8PDT etc don't have this initial "transition" in the file - unless I'm misinterpreting it, which is always a possibility. Would it make sense to adjust either the data or zic to make all zic output (in the 8-byte-timestamp format, at least) cover all of time? I realize that this "extra" data (presumably an insertion of "standard time until the first transition") may well not be historically accurate - but I doubt that it would be any less accurate than other zones in a similar situation. Jon