On Apr 8, 2016, at 7:33 AM, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:
You know, I've occasionally wondered what's the point of having a standard binary format (which has a performance cost compared to having one that uses platform-specific alignment and endianness) if you're not going to actually ship binary files.
So that a set of diskless workstations with different alignment requirements and byte orders (68k-based, SPARC-based, and x86-based) could share their time zone files on the file server. (Yes, that is the reason why I contributed the changes to tzcode, back in the 1980's, to use a standard byte order in the files; I was a developer in the OS group at Sun, and the person who picked up the tzdb at Sun, and I knew the Sun386i would be coming out.)