Yes. Packagers: Please keep it compatible with what iana tarball updaters (such as tzupdater, various language packages) expect but as a directory: minimal changes maximize portable reusability and minimize support/maintenance for everyone. And please don't collide file hierarchy by breaking existing conventions but make it sensible like: /usr/share/iana-tzinfo-src/latest --symlink-> /usr/share/iana-tzinfo-src/20NNz This makes it unambiguous about what it is what and allows for rolling-release upgrades without breaking production processes that cannot survive system "static" shared data files randomly disappearing beneath them. Barry Allard On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 10:54 AM Brian Inglis < Brian.Inglis@systematicsw.ab.ca> wrote:
On 2017-05-22 07:03, Patsy Franklin wrote:
I'd appreciate community input on this plan. Ideally if others decide to also ship a similar subpackage we can use a common naming convention and install directory.
We are planning to ship a new subpackage for users who want to have access to the raw zone data files e.g. leapseconds, and in a pre-determined install location e.g. /usr/share/zoneinfo/zonedata/.
How about using /usr/share/tzdata{,-src}/ maybe with subdirectories tzdata-2017b, etc.
The raw zone data is useful for users designing their own interfaces on top of this data. The broadest flexibility is offered by the raw zone data, and while the compiled binary data is versioned and more stable, some users have expressed a request for the raw zone data. The understanding is that the raw zone data format may change.
In summary: Our current plan is to use -zonedata in naming the subpackage, For example, tzdata-zonedata-2017b-1.el7.
How about tzdata-src-2017b...?
We plan to install the files in this subpackage under /usr/share/zoneinfo/zonedata/.
Adding zonedata does not add any useful information about the contents and storing under /usr/share/zoneinfo/ could be confusing as there are already subdirectories posix and right holding copies of standard and leapsecond compensated binary data files, so TZ=posix/... and TZ=right/... are valid zones, and users may expect something similar to happen using TZ=zonedata/... which would be unfortunate.
Just as an example we would ship the following files: LICENSE version africa antarctica asia australasia europe northamerica southamerica pacificnew etcetera backward systemv factory backzone iso3166.tab leapseconds leap-seconds.list zone1970.tab zone.tab
README, CONTRIBUTING, NEWS, and Theory should be included, also tz-how-to.html which documents how to define and use the sources. leap-seconds.list should be a (symbolic?) link to the canonical file version leap-seconds.<timestamp> e.g. leap-seconds.3692908800.
-- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada