On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 8:29 AM Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On 11/9/21 02:23, Eliot Lear wrote:
Which are we talking about? There are already the POSIX interfaces. Are we talking about the binary files? Is this something on which we are likely to gain consensus?
For binary files (the TZif files) we have Internet RFC 8536 and its draft successor RFC 8536bis <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-murchison-rfc8536bis/>. Arthur, Ken and I drafted this mostly tzdb's tzfile.5, and although the RFC has been mentioned occasionally this mailing list has not focused on that effort and hasn't helped its progress. (Occasionally people here have suggested using up the spare space in the TZif header for some extension, but none of these proposals have seemed to be worth the cost.)
The issues causing controversy on this list have been in areas not covered by RFC 8536 (or RFC 6557, for that matter). If we wanted another RFC to address these other issues, I suppose one way to do it would be to draft one starting with material already in tzdb. It'd take some work to draft any such RFC, though, and any drafters would need to be thick-skinned.
Is the TZDB project intended to support only POSIX systems? I had assumed that the C library was the reference implementation, and the TZif was the file format supporting the reference implementation, not the API into the TZDB. For my downstream library, I parse the raw zone files directly from GitHub. That makes it easy to integrate into the GitHub Actions continuous build system, and I can test against the most recent commits. My downstream usage does not have a file system, or even an operating system. For me, the API into the TZDB project are the raw files, but I understand that my usage is unusual. Brian