Re: New "-b slim" option in 2019b zic: should we turn that on?

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(dot)dunstan(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> I've just run into an issue with this (commit a1207910968). The makefile
> now assumes that zic has this switch. But I was attempting to get around
> an issue on msys2 by using its zic, (ZIC=/usr/bin/zic configure ...). It
> crashes on the floor because it doesn't know about "-b slim". I think we
> probably need a way to turn this off.

I had contemplated injecting the -b switch via

# any custom options you might want to pass to zic while installing data files
-ZIC_OPTIONS =
+ZIC_OPTIONS = -b slim

which would allow overriding it by defining the ZIC_OPTIONS macro.
Does that seem appropriate? I didn't do it because I worried about
interference with existing uses of ZIC_OPTIONS ... but who knows
whether there are any.

BTW, building with old versions of zic is not guaranteed to work anyway.
They do tend to wait a year or two before they start to use new zic
features in the timezone data files, but they don't wait indefinitely.

regards, tom lane