I used to be the guy who did the zoneinfo updates for Solaris. We used the TZ database, but, for some reason never explained to me, we had our own version of the TZ code in libc. I ported the command line utilities, but didn't really get it right. I left Sun in mid '97 and I was still getting queries about the code from my former coworkers almost three years later. One of the pains in updating the database was that the TZ naming conventions would change and had to apply changes to ensure backwards compatibility with older releases of Solaris. Also, we were not including all compiled timezone entries. This was a Solaris packaging issue. The TZ database were included in the core Solaris package and at one time there was a requirement that the core package fit on a single Sun 207 Meg HDs. When I first updated the TZ database (which had not been updated in a while), the size of the compiled TZ entries tripled to over half a Meg, so I had some explaining to do. What is the zone.tab file? I don't remember that. alan
Srinivas Nagaraj wrote:
The TZ (zoneinfo) database comes installed with several operating systems like Linux, Solaris, etc.
I have noticed the content of the TZ database varies between different versions of the same operating system and also between operating systems. This could have been because of when a snapshot of the TZ database was taken.
Ofcourse, one significant difference is the actual name of the time zone. Depending on the content of the TZ database, the time zone name look different. Is it because the TZ database has evolved?
I also noticed that the zone.tab file is not distributed on a number of installations. Was that operating system installation decision?
Now my main question, is it an appropriate application specific common practice to use an application specific TZ database? That way the time zone names can be consistent, irrespective of where the application is installed?
Thank you.
Srini