Jesper, Thanks for your email with several comments on, well, let's say the art of being up to date. My DST start/end list has been compiled from the tzdata2000a data, with the aid of a Macintosh HyperCard application I developed recently. I intend to follow the _published tzdata_ closely, even if somebody on the tz-mailing list tells that there could be something wrong. As fas as I can guess, it is up to Paul Eggert to make decisions about all new information and proposals and up to Arthur Olson to produce new tzcode and tzdata files. This process takes a while. The Australia data is in study and confirmation has been asked; cf. Paul's email to Margaret Turner, Jan. 22. I am following time zone information on the Internet for several years and I have found that the tzdata information seems to be the most up to date and the most accurate. Probably not 100% accurate, but consistently the most up to date and the most accurate. There are many web pages in existence which use the tzdata information themselves, but I have found that in many cases they do not use the latest information. I looked today at timezoneconverter.com and I had the impression that they are using the tzdata1999h information from October 1999 (http://www.timezoneconverter.com/tzchist.html). The site of Steffen Thorsen (http://www.timeanddate.com) deserves to be listed on the tz-link.htm page. On his credits page he writes: "These are resources available on the net, which has helped very much during the development and maintenance of this site. The Time Zone Database - maintained by Arthur David Olson, Paul Eggert and hundreds of volunteers, available at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ - much of time zone information is obtained here". I particularly like his neat webinterface and many functions. He seems to be pretty up to date, but it looks like he uses predominantly tzdata, so probably nothing new here. About the time formats used in tzdata files. I agree with you that it looks a bit like a mess, but the format is clearly explained in the file zic.8 in the tzcode folder. A time followed by w is 'wall clock' time, followed by s is local standard time, followed by u, g or z is universal time. Without a subsequent letter wall clock time is assumed. My interpretations: 'wall clock' time is the current local time, which could be wintertime or summertime. The 'local standard' time is always the local wintertime. 'Universal' time is the same as UTC. Although this is a reaction to a more or less private email, I hope you don't mind if I send my email in copy to the tz-mailing list, since it is possible that the answers are useful to more people. Even then, some of my interpretations could be wrong and I would like to be corrected on them. Regards, Oscar van Vlijmen 2000-01-31