Traditionally, src/timezone/data/ contains the source files of the
IANA timezone database. That currently amounts to just under 700KB,
and it's growing all the time, mostly because they keep what amounts
to their entire commit log in the comments :-(
IANA have recently started distributing an abbreviated version of
that data, in a single comment-free file "tzdata.zi" that looks like
this:
# This zic input file is in the public domain.
R A 1916 o - Jun 14 23s 1 S
R A 1916 1919 - O Sun>=1 23s 0 -
R A 1917 o - Mar 24 23s 1 S
R A 1918 o - Mar 9 23s 1 S
R A 1919 o - Mar 1 23s 1 S
R A 1920 o - F 14 23s 1 S
R A 1920 o - O 23 23s 0 -
R A 1921 o - Mar 14 23s 1 S
...
The current version is just a shade over 100KB, and its growth
rate can be projected to be noticeably slower than the master
source files. It's alleged to compress much better than the
master files too, though I've not tried to measure that.
So I'm wondering if we should replace src/timezone/data/* with
tzdata.zi, in the name of reducing the size of our tarballs.
It's substantially harder to see what changes they made from
one version to the next by comparing .zi files, but I'm not
sure if anyone cares about that.
Anybody here actually care about reading the zone data files?
regards, tom lane
