From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
cc: Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Anybody care about having the verbose form of the tzdata files?
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References: <1915.1511210334@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Comments: In-reply-to Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
	message dated "Wed, 22 Nov 2017 09:21:03 +0900"
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Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 19:34:57 -0500
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Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 6:28 PM, Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se> wro=
te:
> On 20 Nov 2017, at 21:38, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> Anybody here actually care about reading the zone data files?

>> I doubt there is anyone who cares about that who isn=E2=80=99t already =
consuming the
>> upstream data.

> Perhaps I do. If this set of files gets removed and replaced by the zi
> file, is it possible to still know easily which files are being
> removed during a minor upgrade? When doing minor upgrades of a MSI
> installer (Windows, yeah!), I need to keep track of files that get
> deleted or a minor upgrade would simply fail. The tweak that I have is
> to list them and recreate them as empty. The thing is ugly as hell,
> but I need to be able to track which files are being removed easily.
> And as far as I am checking, for example taking the rather recent
> example of Riyadh87 in commit e04641f4, src/timezone/data allows to
> keep easily track of files removed. If this gets removed, I am pretty
> convinced that this tracking gets more complicated.

I'm a bit confused.  The files under src/timezone/data/ don't correspond
to individual installed zone data files; most of them describe a lot of
zones.  (Riyadh87 and friends were outliers.)  Seems to me that if you
care about the installed file list, much the easiest way is to run
"make install" and then look to see what's under share/timezones/.
That wouldn't change if we use the abbreviated form of the zic input
data.

Now, personally, I've long diff'd the old and new timezone/data/ files
in the process of writing the commit message for a tzdata update.
I'd have to change that process --- but it was always a pretty tedious and
obsessive-compulsive way to do it anyway, because most of the diffs are
comments.  I'd probably just start relying more fully on the IANA
announcement emails, like this one:

http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2017-October/000047.html

As far as I've seen, they are reliably good about summarizing everything
you need to know about an update.  They definitely always mention
additions and removals of zones.

			regards, tom lane