On Thu, May 2, 2013, at 16:18, Tobias Conradi wrote:
Since that mentions "time zone rule files",
It uses both names to refer to files such as /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York (location of /usr/share/zoneinfo may vary) i.e. the binary files (not part of the distribution) that are read from at runtime to do time conversions. You can infer this from the fact that it talks about them _being named after cities_, which no file in the distribution is.
I wonder what these then are, and what the files are that are "are used as inputs to the zic program"
Why did you put that in quotes? What could POSSIBLY be unclear about "used as inputs to the zic program"? The zic program runs, with a file such as northamerica as its input, and files such as America/New_York, America/Los_Angeles, and dozens of others are its output.