date parser function. This makes our function less dependent on system-
provided functions and instead we do all the magic ourselves. We also no
longer depend on the TZ environment variable.
using one of the so-called 'right' time zones that take into account
leap seconds, which causes the tests to fail (as reported by
Daniel Black in bug report #1745964).
are not, due mainly to the lack of support for XML character entities
(e.g. & => & ). This will make it easier to validate test files using
tools like xmllint, as well as edit and view them using XML tools.