On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 at 19:10, Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On 7/27/22 01:47, Stephen Colebourne via tz wrote:
Can you clarify what is generated? the tooling chains that global-tz supports need the *source* files (africa, europe, northamerica...) to contain the data
You can get that by using the tailored_tarballs target added recently. For example, this shell command:
make DATAFORM=rearguard \ PACKRATDATA=backzone PACKRATLIST=zone.tab tailored_tarballs
generates a tarball that should be suitable for the toolchains you mention.
Thanks. The output being generated here is correct for some downstream toolchains AFAICT. Observations: 1) Some of the toolchains (ThreeTen-BP at least) depend on the `leapseconds` file, so can that be added please. 2) The generated tarball places all data in the etcetera file, rather than in africa/asia etc. This may cause problems for downstream users that wish to only package some files. I suspect that group of people is small, nevertheless it is worth noting that the generated tarball is not equivalent. 3) The generated tarball omits other files like zone.tab, iso3166.tab, backzone, backward and so on. In effect the contents are significantly less functional than those of global-tz. ie. global-tz goes to significant lengths to simulate exactly what iana-tz would have looked like if the pre-1970 merges had never happened. The output of global-tz is therefore fully compatible with all toolchains, no matter what they do with the data. Actions/Questions: As a minimum we need to add the `leapseconds` file to the generated tarball. Is it practical to keep the various files separate? Or to include more files? Right now it doesn't really feel like a compatible tzdata tarball as it has quite different content. My concern here is non-Java downstream projects that wish to avoid the merges - do they have what they need? (ie. I would prefer not to maintain global-tz, and it will need a good few hours work to undo the latest European merges, but I would need to be sure that all potential use cases are covered.) thanks Stephen