On 10/02/2017 01:37, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 02/09/2017 04:44 PM, Steven R. Loomis wrote:
Trying to locate the actual id of a zone file is itself a huge hassle, as John Layt also noted in http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2015-October/022838.html
Yes, it is a real management hassle that is not trivial to solve. Unfortunately nobody has had the time to come up with a practical solution, as far as I know.
There are political objections to some of the zone names, so putting them in the data files might raise a few eyebrows. Wouldn't the names have been filenames elsewhere on disk, somewhere in the "zoneinfo" directory?
Not in some installations. Android, I think, does not create filenames like "America/New_York". More important, these names are not part of the format now, and standardizing them in the format would increase the likelihood of causing political irritations. And still more important, downstream users are free to add to the list of names, and many do so; this lessens the utility of using a "standard" name, as these names are not as "standard" as one might want.
The political irritations could be eliminated by assigning a numeric ID to each zone and storing that in the binary file (along with version information, if deemed necessary). This might require numeric IDs to be added to the source data files. They _could_ be generated from a hash of the name, but sometimes the name changes sometimes (e.g. Asia/Kolkatta) and it would be nice to have a stable ID for a zone. -- -=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk> )=- -=( Web: http://www.mev.co.uk/ )=-