On 15 July 2015 at 21:29, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

<snip>

The man page for zic documents the tz
data format, but not in enough detail for a compliant
implementation

It'd be helpful to fix that. Any ambiguities should be clarified (or documented as being explicitly ambiguous), as was done in commit 2fab66aa164365209e47af24b2337b7c2ffdbe5c. This shouldn't require a complete rewrite.

Righto - I wasn't sure whether the intention was that the man page was complete in a specification sense, or more providing general guidance. I think it's clear in the vast majority of cases - it's only corner cases where I've found myself wondering how to interpret the rules.

I brought it up mostly as it was the motivation for needing regression tests, but I think we should separate the work. Obviously the burden is on me to be clear about exactly where and how I'm having problems. Would you prefer that I report my confusion on the list, or by direct mail?

If modifying zdump to add
an extra flag is deemed an appropriate course of action, do we have any
volunteers to do so?

I can volunteer to change zdump but it's not clear yet what needs to be changed. First we'd need to design a good format for regression testing, and document that format. This hasn't been done yet, and will take some thinking. Existing format proposals haven't ensured that the zdump output should contain everything visible to the API.

Right - as a non-API user, I'm mostly in the dark here. The proposal I've implemented on my github repo is very much to scratch my particular itch, and was mostly to make a start so that we could improve it.

Is there any information missing on an individual transition basis, or is it more global matters (links, start/end points, range of transitions) that is missing information?

Jon