July 2010 - tz - lists.iana.org

Olson programming language specific data sets
by Rich Tibbett July 4, 2010

July 4, 2010

Hi, I would like to request that the following resource be added to http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm: http://code.google.com/p/tzdata/ This project provides programming language specific representations of Olson timezone data. Currently this includes XML, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, JSON and CSV formatted data. The repository is updated as soon as the Olson FTP distribution is updated. All data can be downloaded as a zip and/or it can be obtained/synced via anonymous SVN. Data is made available under the MIT license. Thanks for all your hard work and I hope this resource will be of interest for people looking for language-specific timezone bindings. best regards, Rich Tibbett

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Problems with this mailing list?
by Yves Goergen July 4, 2010

July 4, 2010

Hi, I observe some strange behaviour with this mailing list. When trying to subscribe, nothing at all happened and after a second try, somebody seemed to have done that manually. This is a very irritating start for new people. I had sent a message to the list a few days ago which just didn't appear while a later one was sent around quite quickly. After a few hours I just resent my message and then it worked. I didn't receive any error message since then. It just got lost on the way with no notice. My mail server keeps informing me now that the delivery of my messages to the list is delayed by 24..48.. hours, but I already received the list's echo of the regarding message. I'm wondering what final error message my mail server will come up with when the retry timeout is over. The list's address is changed in all messages I get from it. Instead of tz(a)elsie.nci.nih.gov, my messages appear to be sent to tz(a)lecserver.nci.nih.gov. I even see messages to "tz(a)elsie.nci.nih.gov" <tz(a)lecserver.nci.nih.gov>... What is the real address now?! All very confusing here. I didn't observe such behaviour in any of the other 13 mailing lists I'm subscribed to... -- Yves Goergen "LonelyPixel" <nospam.list(a)unclassified.de> Visit my web laboratory at http://beta.unclassified.de

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Some questions about the database format
by Yves Goergen July 1, 2010

July 1, 2010

Hi, I intend to use the tz database in my C# calendar application. Since I need a decent time zone support, I was pointed to this database from the MSDN forums. I now have a few questions regarding the file format of the text files. A day specification of "Sun>=1" or "Sun>=8" should be clear, I interpret this as the first/second Sunday in a month. But what weekday and week is "Sun>=25" or "Sun>=2"? How is the Zone field "[UNTIL]" to be understood exactly? Is it including or excluding the given time? What does "1990" mean, is it until and inclusive the whole year 1990, ie /1990-12-31T23:59:59 or is it something around 1990-01-01? What does the time specification "2:00s" mean? I've seen it several times but couldn't make any sense of it. Are all rules in the text files sorted ascending by time ("FROM" year)? That would simplify the processing because in order to convert them into .NET framework structures I need pairs of DST start and end rules together for a range of years, and thus need to resolve the overlapping rule definitions.

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