On 7/19/21 2:42 PM, Patsy Griffin via tz wrote:
We are looking at ways to reduce the amount of timezone data needed. Specifically, we are considering providing a minimal/UTC-only tzdata package.
The definition of "minimal" depends on what software you're using. For tzcode, the minimal/UTC-only tzdata should be trivial: it's the empty set. In other words, install no data files whatsoever. This is because tzcode defaults to UTC if nothing is installed. I think glibc behaves the same way. If you have some POSIX-compatible library that doesn't default to UTC in this way, you can set TZ='UTC0' in the environment. Perhaps there's some software on your system that doesn't behave the same way that tzcode and glibc do, and that doesn't conform to POSIX. If so, you could use the following line: Zone Etc/UTC 0 - UTC as input to zic (or whatever other .zi parser your software is using), and then use TZ='Etc/UTC'. We could add some documentation along those lines, or a Makefile rule to generate that one-line file, or something like that; the details would depend on what you need.