javazic timezone format

Question

Where can I find documentation about the binary data format outputted by javazic (the files shipped in Debian's tzdata-java package)?

The standard format used in /usr/share/zoneinfo has no explicit concept of daylight savings time versus standard time. It only knows about a timezone having different offsets from UTC at different times of the year.

Nevertheless, there are some libraries (like Boost's time_zone_base class, and the Ruby TZInfo library) that prefer to think about a time zone as having a "standard time" and then a daylight savings time with some offset from standard time, so they're not really compatible with the standard zoneinfo files.

I saw the documentation for the javazic format a long time ago, and I seem to recall that the data contained in javazic format may be a better fit for these libraries than the zoneinfo format. But I can't remember where the documentation is.

Answer 1

IIUC, build.tools.javazic is a package for compiling the Olson zoneinfo database into Java zone information files. The API documentation is a little terse, but it might be a place to start.

Answer 2

It looks like the documentation I'm looking for is in the sun.util.calendar.ZoneInfoFile class.