On Feb 24, 2006, at 1:35 AM, Markus Kuhn wrote:
It might be better to maintain TZDATA in xml and have a translator back to the current format.
And the advantage would be what exactly?
Stability, so that tools that parse the data can deal with change more gracefully. The ICU project has had a difficult time keeping up with changes to the file and tools. We can't use the output files -- which *are* stable -- because they do not contain all the data from the input that ICU needs. However, I don't care whether the "master" copy is XML or not, just that it is possible to generate XML (or some other stable format) from the "official" version of zic, so that when the timezone file format changes, or zic changes, the stable format doesn't change. Deborah Goldsmith Internationalization, Unicode Liaison Apple Computer, Inc. goldsmit@apple.com