On Jul 14, 2015, at 4:56 PM, Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.ab.ca> wrote:
...
TZdist seems to require a server which tracks changes at zone and impacted date time range levels (implying also dependencies on rules and aliases). The server would have to pull apart the current zoneinfo source or binary files and track when changes happened and what ranges were impacted. The server returns zone info within changed and impacted date time ranges of interest to the client in iCalendar, XML, or JSON formats, where the client then has to decide how to apply these to its data base.
This would allow automated updating for calendar applications but not obviously for system zoneinfo data, which is the topic of interest, and would require an iCalendar parser hooked up to part of the zic compiler.
I don’t understand why you make those assumptions. tzdist is just a protocol for conveying timezone data. It’s clearly possible to feed that data into the “system zoneinfo data”, that’s purely a local matter. paul