- tz - lists.iana.org

renaming the mailing list in the code and data files
by Mariano Absatz - el Baby May 30, 2012

May 30, 2012

Since the old tz(a)elsie.nci.nih.gov mailing list no longer exist (in fact, there's no mx record, the name is actually a cname and the target host doesn't even seem to be accepting packets on port 25) it might be a good idea to rename the list in the code and data files where it is present. I wrote 2 small patches (attached) that do this against tzdata2012c and tzcode2012b. I don't see much of an urgency in doing this, but we might apply the patch whenever we have a new set of files to release. Regards -- Mariano Absatz - El Baby www.clueless.com.ar

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[OT] tz humor
by Mariano Absatz - el Baby May 30, 2012

May 30, 2012

It seems like xkcd is turning us obsolete: http://xkcd.com/1061/ :) -- Mariano Absatz - El Baby www.clueless.com.ar

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Re: [tz] Bug - Statement by Paul Eggert (a TZ Coordinator) on update process not agreeing with IANA sources
by SM May 29, 2012

May 29, 2012

At 13:53 26-05-2012, Tobias Conradi wrote: >Maybe your point of view is that of the RFC 6557 authors. I can only express my view as an individual. I don't know whether the authors of RFC 6557 share my point of view. >But I wonder whether IANA doesn't want to have some say about what >happens in a project linked from the IANA homepage >http://www.iana.org/. At a guess some information about IANA actions may be in Section 8 of RFC 6557. >The IANA time zone data is referred to by RFC4833, RFC5545, The TZ database reference in RFC 4833 mentioned "Eggert, P. and A. Olson". There is a link to http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm >How do you think an extreme case is defined? Is it an extreme case to >have Russian zones wrong for more than half a year and to have no zone >covering Bouvet Island, which has a UTC offset defined by Norwegian >law? I leave it to the time zone community or Paul Eggert to see whether a case is extreme as it is easier than coming up with a definition. In my opinion the above examples seem more of a matter for Paul Eggert to decide or the time zone community to agree upon. Regards, -sm

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IETF RFC 6557 vs Paul Eggert
by Tobias Conradi May 29, 2012

May 29, 2012

http://www.ietf.org/ The mission of the IETF is to make the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6557 ------ To be clear, the TZ Coordinator SHALL NOT set time zone policy for a region but use judgment and whatever available sources exist to assess what the average person on street would think the time actually is, or in case of historical corrections, was. ------ Either "average person on street" is to be taken literal, and if there are no streets and no average persons, the section does not apply. Or Paul Eggert (TZ Coordinator) is obliged to adhere to that section in the Bouvet Island case, where Norwegian laws clearly show that the time officially is UTC+01:00 on that island, irrespective of presence of human beings. http://www.lovdata.no/all/hl-20070126-004.html ----- § 6. Norsk normaltid Normaltiden i Norge er én time foran koordinert universaltid (UTC+1). ----- -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Stable fixed length identifiers for IANA time zones
by Tobias Conradi May 26, 2012

May 26, 2012

Steven, Mark, I checked the latest timezone.xml contained in core.zip linked from http://cldr.unicode.org/index/bcp47-extension Are the values for the names that are not /[a-z]{5}/ , e.g. <type name="mxstis" ... > already permanently fixed? What happens if Santa Isabel gets an UN/LOCODE in the future? I am using UN/LOCODEs since at least 2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UN/LOCODE&diff=prev&oldid=1414613 In my system the first two letters never map into a set of ISO 3166-1 countries (current and former) without one set member being or having been the country for the location, e.g. "jeruslm", the first letters, JE, stand for Jersey, which never was a country where Jerusalem was located. If there is "usnavajo" placing "navajo" below "us", then <type name="jeruslm" alias="Asia/Jerusalem Asia/Tel_Aviv Israel" description="Jerusalem"/> is inconsistent, since Asia/Jerusalem is used for Israel, which would lead to "iljerusalem" or so and instead of "hebron" and "gaza" it would be "pshebron" and "psgaza" Since UN/LOCODE doesn't use the numbers 0 and 1, I created private codes using "1" in third position, so for Santa Isabel I would use MX1SI or in lower case mx1si for Hebron PS1HB, Gaza PS1GZ That way the codes all can be of the same length, namely 5 characters. Tobias On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Steven R. Loomis <srl(a)icu-project.org> wrote: > On 05/24/2012 04:27 PM, Tobias Conradi wrote: ... > E.g. CLDR has created UN/LOCODE based codes: > http://cldr.unicode.org/development/development-process/design-proposals/bc… > > > This a draft design document proposing what is now the 'tz' field of IETF > BCP 47 Extension U < https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6067> referencing UTS35 > and data < > http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/#Unicode_Language_and_Locale_Identifiers>. > However, it is not relevant to simply the discussion of "." and "-", > instead, the UN/LOCODE based codes (with some additions) were needed due to > length restrictions. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Re: [tz] Bug - Statement by Paul Eggert (a TZ Coordinator) on update process not agreeing with IANA sources
by SM May 26, 2012

May 26, 2012

At 10:56 26-05-2012, Tobias Conradi wrote: >Restricted by the following: > >http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6557 >BCP 175 [snip] >"The TZ Coordinator is an IANA Designated Expert" In my opinion RFC 6557 was an attempt to document some of the details about the "TZ Database" and it is self-contained except for two explicit references about the work. A lot of stuff is left to the discretion of the TZ coordinator. There are some guidelines to allow resolution if there is an extreme case. Regards, -sm

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Proposal to deprecate "." and "-" in zone names
by Tobias Conradi May 26, 2012

May 26, 2012

CURRENT ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory says "Within a file name component, use only ASCII letters, `.', `-' and `_'." In ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/zone.tab I found none having "." I found three having "-": America/Blanc-Sablon Africa/Porto-Novo America/Port-au-Prince PROPOSED Change ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory "Within a file name component, use only ASCII letters and `_'." REASONING @"." "." is not used, document current usage. Reduce number of possible variations. @"-" Reduce number of possible variations. Avoid discussions about names as happened with the zone proposal for the Crozet Islands "Alfred-Faure" vs "Alfred Faure". @both Some environments don't allow "/". Since "/" is part of the zone name, a replacement may be needed. If "." and "-" are not allowed for zone names anymore, then they can be used for replacing "/". -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Re: [tz] Bug - Statement by Paul Eggert (a TZ Coordinator) on update process not agreeing with IANA sources
by SM May 26, 2012

May 26, 2012

Arthur David Olson posted a message about a new home for time zone stuff in August 2009 [1]. The time zone stuff used to be called the Olson database. Robert Elz provided a temporary home for the Olson database in October 2011 [2]. Paul Eggert was suggested as TZ coordinator in March 2012 [3]. The mailing list was supposed to be be used just as it has been: to learn of, discuss, and confirm TZ definition changes, as well as to serve as an announcement list for new versions of the database. In my humble opinion it is up to the TZ coordinator to determine what to do about the details of the Olson database. Regards, -sm 1. http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2009-August/015734.html 2. http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2011-October/016898.html 3. http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-March/017597.html

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Proposal to define a Private Use Area within the zone naming scheme
by Tobias Conradi May 26, 2012

May 26, 2012

CURRENT: No private use area defined. PROPOSAL: Define a private use area. Use AA or Aa to have the name start with the same letter as most other Areas that represent continents do (America, Africa, Asia, Australia) Since AA is an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 private code, it can be used by CLDR, that uses UN/LOCODEs, too, to define a private range. The private range would be defined on the top level, so it is not affected by any change to the Area names (America, Africa, Asia, Australia, etc.) Organizations are then free to have their own subareas inside, e.g. i Aa/NorwayGov/Bouvet/ Aa/RussiaGov/Barnaul/ Aa/GemBuesingen/Buesingen/ Aa/Pre1970project/ Aa/JohnDoe/ Aa/Legal/ (legal time instead of majority observed time) REASONING: Allow people to create zones having names that will not be the same as IANA time zone names. This is helpful when the IANA time zone database maintainers do not fix bugs (e.g. West Siberia) and do not create zones for regions solely because they have no permanent population, despite the time there being defined by law of the sovereign state to which it belongs (Bouvet Island). == Systems having a private use area == === Country codes === ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 AA, QM ... QZ, XA ...XZ, ZZ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#User-assigned_code_elements ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 AAA ... AAZ, QMA ... QZZ, XAA ... XZZ, ZZA ... ZZZ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-3#User-assigned_code_elements ISO 3166-1 numeric 900 ... 999 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_numeric#User-assigned_code_elements === Script codes === ISO 15924 Qaaa ... Qabx (900 ... 949): 50 Codes reserved for private use. === Language codes === ISO 639-3 Private Use Area (range qaa to qtz) -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Infrastructure - bug tracking system
by Tobias Conradi May 26, 2012

May 26, 2012

Kim, apart from TZ Coordinator Paul Eggert you are the only person I know of that has an official position involved with the IANA time zone database. Is it possible for IANA to provide a bug tracking system for the IANA time zone database maintenance? Currently there are several unfixed bugs, but I can see no full listing of them. So same bugs may get reported several times or stay unfixed without being reported again for a long time. I am aware of several bugs, inconsistencies and suggestions for possible improvements I sent to the mailing list and also of some sent by other people e.g. Alexander Krivenyshev (http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2011-September/008798.html) Andrew Paprocki (http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-May/017854.html) Guy Harris (http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-May/017756.html) Ian Abbott (http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-May/017725.html) But these or only from the time when I was member of the mailing list. Maybe there are several more bugs that are still not fixed. Tobias -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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