Re: Redhat 7.3 time manipulation bug

cbbrowne(at)cbbrowne(dot)com writes:
> By the way, the seemingly relevant link to look at for TZ info is
> http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm, linking to the data used by
> various Unix implementations.

Oh, this is interesting: it claims that

: This database (often called tz or zoneinfo) is used by several
: implementations, including GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DJGPP,
: HP-UX, IRIX, Open UNIX, Solaris, and Tru64.

The actual timezone database seems to consist of about half a meg of
heavily commented text data files. The accompanying code (probably
providing far more functionality than we actually need) is under 400k.
(Both figures are for uncompressed source.) Not large at all.

I cannot find any sign of a copyright or license in the files; I think
it is intended to be public domain, and in any case if the *BSDs are
using it then it must have a BSD-compatible license.

It seems to me that it'd be really practical to just take what we need
out of this distribution and forgo all dependency on system-provided
timezone databases. And, since there's a mailing list maintaining it,
we could expect someone else to handle updates ;-) ... we'd just have
to be careful to use the database files unmodified, so that we could
drop in new releases from time to time.

Comments? Anyone want to do the legwork?

regards, tom lane