[Leaplist] daylight savings change

[John Simpson]

On 2007-03-08, at 0742, "pberry2"@cfl.rr.com wrote:
>
> The TZdata file I grabbed from the server an NIH (and expanded/ 
> extracted, with tar) contains three files of html and one is  
> NorthAmerica.

that's funny, the one i grabbed had 19 files. this is the exact file  
i grabbed:

ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz

looking again at the contents, i see that there are some small pieces  
of HTML in the "northamerica" file (basically "a" tags around URLs,  
and a "pre" tag at the beginning) but they are not true HTML files.  
the first two lines of the "northamerica" (no capitals in the  
filename) are:

# @(#)northamerica      8.12
# <pre>

so i guess if somebody looked at the file in a browser, they would  
see what looks like plain text, but it would have clickable links.

> So, I am confused as to using that in my usr/share/zoneinfo

expand the file i named above, it will have a "northamerica" file.

then run "zic -d ./tempdir northamerica". it should create and  
populate a "tempdir" directory with the following files:

tempdir/PST8PDT
tempdir/HST
tempdir/Atlantic/Bermuda
tempdir/America/Indiana/Indianapolis
tempdir/America/Indiana/Petersburg
tempdir/America/Indiana/Knox
...
tempdir/America/Chicago
tempdir/America/Yakutat
tempdir/America/Kentucky/Louisville
tempdir/America/Kentucky/Monticello
tempdir/America/Dawson_Creek
tempdir/EST5EDT
tempdir/CST6CDT
tempdir/MST7MDT
tempdir/MST
tempdir/EST
tempdir/Pacific/Honolulu

so in this case you would copy "tempdir/EST5EDT" over "/usr/share/ 
zoneinfo/EST5EDT", and copy "tempdir/America/New_York" over "/usr/ 
share/zoneinfo/America/New_York", and so forth. you may want to use  
this command, which will copy all of the new files into place:

cp -Rv tempdir/* /usr/share/zoneinfo/

or if you really trust it, you can run this as root and skip the  
whole "tempdir" idea:

zic -d /usr/share/zoneinfo northamerica

> My system still reports April 1:  will the html be read correctly,  
> and is it inefficient to go that route of using an html file?

think of the "northamerica" file as your source code, "zic" as a  
compiler, and the files it creates under "tempdir" as the  
executables. just like when you install a program, you only need to  
put the executables out there where the system will find them- the  
"source code" is not what you "install" under /usr/share/zoneinfo.

and actually, "zic" stands for "zone info compiler", so it actually  
IS a compiler- it's just that the binary files it builds are not  
executables, they're zoneinfo files.

and again, when it's all said and done, don't forget to copy one of  
the new zoneinfo files over /etc/localtime, so that your system  
programs (syslogd especially) will know about the change, even though  
it's running without an explicit TZ environment variable.

----------------------------------------------------------------
| John M. Simpson    ---   KG4ZOW   ---    Programmer At Large |
| http://www.jms1.net/                         <jms1 at jms1.net> |
----------------------------------------------------------------
| http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4312730277175242198 |
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