[Pkg-javascript-devel] Packaging node-timezone

[Diane Trout]

On Sun, 2019-11-10 at 19:26 +0100, Paolo Greppi wrote:
> Hi Diane, see low and lower
> 
> Paolo

Thanks for getting back so quickly.

> When I look at where debian's tzdata package pulls upstream tarball:
> https://salsa.debian.org/glibc-team/tzdata/blob/sid/debian/watch
> it's: ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/releases/tzdb-2019c.tar.lz
> this contains flat files for each continent.
> It seems the d/rules unpacks in into all the Uppercased Dirs and
> Files in /usr/share/zoneinfo
> 
> What https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tz-link.html calls their
> "development repository" is eggert/tz which also has the flat files.
> 
> This means that the files you need are in the source of tzdata
> package.
> If node-timezone only needs that at build time, I wonder if you could
> build-depend on the source of tzdata ?

That led me to try a few things...

Unfortunately Debian doesn't support source dependencies yet. tarpman
in the #debian-devel channel pointed me to this debian-devel email
covering the topic.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/07/msg00594.html

While looking more carefully I did find node-timezone builds the files
available in /usr/share/zoneinfo, so I thought I might be able to use
the binary tzdata package. Unfortunately later it seems to parse text
per continent files from the eggert source for building the javascript
data files. (which are not available in the tzdata binary file)

Also timezone's parser may not be updated to track the current release
of the tzdata as I tried updating it to build with 2019c and it
crashed.

I did make a couple of minor improvements that I should commit, but I'm
pretty tired right now and will do that sometime tomorrow.

Diane