On 5/13/22 13:51, Nick Deguillaume wrote:

> I now recognise that I would have been better off using the zic
> documentation as my primary source.

Yes, that's a better approach. In the attached patch (which I've
installed in the development version) I added a note to that effect in
the how-to document.


> 1. tz_link.html  states that:
> *Sources for the tz database are UTF-8 text files... *
> Some of the comments in some of the old files contain non UTF-8 single byte
> representations of accented letters.

Thanks, fixed in the attached proposed patch by saying it's been UTF-8
since 2013a.


> 2. The  tz_how-to.html states that:
> *Prior to the 2020b release, it was called the TYPE field, though it was
> never used in the main data ...*
> However, some of the old data in https://data.iana.org/time-zones/releases/
> contains "even" and "odd" to account for the Adeleide festival. (

Fixed in the attached by saying it's been the practice since 2000e.


> 3. The  tz_how-to.html states that:
>
> *The FORMAT column specifies the usual abbreviation of the time zone name.
> It can have one of three forms:a string of three or more characters that
> are either ASCII alphanumerics, “+”, or “-”, in which case that’s the
> abbreviation ...*
> I had to allow an underscore and space to allow all the files to pass.

Fixed in the attached by saying "should" instead of "can". Older data
sometimes violated that advice, but this meant the resulting
abbreviations didn't conform to POSIX. I also added a mention of %z there.