Jon Skeet wrote:
Unfortunately dump doesn't have all the information I'd wish it to - namely the split between standard and daylight offsets. It indicates whether a zone is in daylight savings or not, but not how much that contributes to the overall offset.
That shouldn't matter. No software should care about that. Any software that does care is delving into undocumented and unsupported areas.
As for platforms that don't use the tz database at all - as the purpose of this is to validate the use of the tz database, I'm not sure that's much of an advantage.
It can be helpful, for example, when comparing a simple tz database entry to the should-be-equivalent POSIX TZ string (which does not require the tz database).
I haven't yet got a feeling for your thoughts on the proposal... is this something you can see any future in? I suppose the canonical file wouldn't *have* to come from IANA, but that does feel like the best option.
I can see something along these lines working, yes. That is, we could distribute extra tarballs containing zdump output (with a better format perhaps), zic output, and tzdist-format output (if we ever get around to doing that).