when they made Alpha's) uses /etc/svc.conf for the purpose fixed below for
  other OSes. He made c-ares check for and understand it if present.

- Now c-ares will use local host name lookup _before_ DNS resolving by default
  if nothing else is told.

member in the struct is used.

  file to determine the sequence in which to search /etc/hosts and DNS.  So on
  systems where this order is defined by /etc/host.conf instead of a "lookup"
  entry in /etc/resolv.conf, C-ARES will always default to looking in DNS
  first, and /etc/hosts second.

  c-ares now looks at

  1) resolv.conf (for the "lookup" line);
  2) nsswitch.fon (for the "hosts:" line);
  3) host.conf (for the "order" line).

  First match wins.

it resolving nicely

it anymore

is already in the public header file

the old format now

I was previously #ifdef'ing to a different look when this parser is used

made it deal with named time zones as well as mail-style +0200 ones.

Seems to work fine. I'm comparing with GNU date command:

date -d [date] -u +%s