ICU4J Time Zone Update Utility (ICUTZU)

Contents

Introduction

ICU4J Time Zone Update Utility (ICUTZU) is a utility that supplies ICU4J jar files with the latest time zone information and daylight savings time changeover dates.

The time zone data is stored in zoneinfo.res files which are generated by the ICU team using the Olson Time Zone Database (http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm). Every version of the time zone data corresponds directly to a version of the Olson database. For example "2006a" refers to the first refresh of the Olson database in 2006.

ICUTZU works by searching the file system for ICU4J jar files containing old time zone data, checking online for the newest time zone data and updating the ICU4J jar files accordingly. The user can choose to update from a copy of the time zone data that comes bundled with ICUTZU or from an online copy on the ICU servers.

System Requirements

ICUTZU will run on any system that ICU4J runs on: Solaris 5.9, 5.10, AIX 5.2, 5.3, RHEL 4, 5, Windows XP, Vista, HP-UX 9000.

ICUTZU also requires Java 1.3 or higher to be installed.

Installation

Unpack the archive into a directory of your choosing. For Unix-based systems, you will need to set permissions on runicutzu.sh:

chmod 755 runicutzu.sh

Running ICUTZU

Running in GUI Mode

  1. To start ICUTZU, double-click icutzu.jar or open a console and type java -jar icutzu.jar .

  2. Specify which paths to search and which paths to exclude from the search. By default, all drives are included in the search.

  3. Click Search to begin searching for updatable ICU4J jar files in the directories specified. A new window will pop up during the search with a list of updatable ICU4J jar files found.

  4. Select which ICU4J jar files you wish to update.

  5. Choose the version of time zone data to update with from the drop down list.

  6. Click Update to begin updating the selected ICU4J jar files.

Running in Command-line Mode

  1. Edit the DirectorySearch.txt file and specify which paths ICUTZU will include and exclude in its search. ICUTZU searches directories recursively.

  2. Edit the runicutzuenv.X file, where X depends on your system (.sh for Unix-based systems, .bat for Windows, .cmd for Windows NT):

  3. Run runicutzu.X where X depends on your system (as above). This will build a list of updatable ICU4J files and save it to ICUList.txt.

  4. Edit the runicutzuenv.X file again, and set DISCOVERONLY to false..

  5. Run runicutzu.X again. This will update the files listed in ICUList.txt.

Restoring Changes

When updating an icu4j jar file, the original file is copied to a backup location which is reported during runtime in the console output (which can also be found in the log file).