On 10/11/2011 10:40 AM, Zefram wrote:
Robert Elz wrote:
Note that they're kind of difficult to separate,
On a historical note, I've discovered the origin of this split. It's a suggestion from Robert Elz, archived at <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/1992-November/000227.html>: "perhaps separate the rules from the code in the ftp archives, the rules change more frequently ...". In fact, since then there have been about 85% as many code releases as data releases (~160 code and ~190 data), so that part of the rationale hasn't fared so well. The other part of the rationale is about users with their own code, of which there are some, but the occasional necessary feature added to zic poses difficulties for this mode of use.
-zefram
For what it's worth, I'm one of the "users with their own code." I released a tzdata reader for Tcl on 2004-08-18. I think I've needed to touch it only 3-4 times in the seven years since then as a result of tzdata changes (and all but one of those was arguably a bug in the original code that just wasn't tickled by the earlier tzdata files). The format is actually quite stable. The frequent code releases are more about changes internal to the C library, rather than to zic. -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin