May 9, 2018
12:25 p.m.
On 05/09/2018 11:21 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
addition or deletion of a ruleset near the beginning of the file creates semantically-insignificant changes throughout the rest of the file, making it hard to review the diffs to get a sense of what changed, or to eyeball-validate the .zi file.
I haven't been eyeballing tzdata.zi myself, as it wasn't designed to be readable. Instead, I run "make check_tzs", which compares zdump output, and I eyeball that. We could make tzdata.zi more readable along the lines that you suggest, presumably as a runtime option to zishrink.awk and a corresponding Makefile macro to let builders select whether they want tzdata.zi to be smaller and less-readable, or larger and more-readable.