Doug Royer <doug@home.royer.com>:
There are three goals of this list.
1) Port the government database and 'zic' (Zone Information Compiler) to other OS's and have it also provide the data in VTIMEZONE format. Most UNIX's use the government database format and the zic compiler (man zic).
2) Convert the government database into VTIMEZONE records for IANA to administer.
3) Give away the results to the public domain.
There might be a few misunderstandings involved here. First, there is no "government timezone database". What you see on ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ is the collaboration of a number of volunteers (Arthur Olson, Paul Eggert, et al.), the result of which is commonly referred to as the public domain "Olson database". The only relation to the US government is that the group has been using an ftp server of the National Cancer Institute, which happens to be located in the .gov domain. There exists already a well-established mailing list for discussions on time zones and the maintenance of the Olson database, namely tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Contact tz-request@elsie.nci.nih.go to join the club. Since there is a lot of accumulated expertise on this mailing list, handing over the administration of the database to IANA seems to be a rather dubious buerocratic effort. Who at IANA would take over authority over the database and is really comparably qualified to the current contributors of the Olson database who have done a splendid job for the last 15 years? Please understand that IANA is a registration service, while what the group around Olson is doing is more a detective service that observes and documents the highly complicated world of national and regional decisions about time-zone changes in the world. If government X is going to change its local time zone, it is more likely that the database maintainer will hear about this from various informers or media reports around the world, as well as resources such as IATA or CIA. It is much less likely that the respective countries will report timezone changes directly to IANA officially. A detective service can provide a more accurate representation of the real world than a registration service. Just dropping the maintenance of the time zone database into the responsibility of IANA might give them a task they underestimate at the moment. If you don't like the current zic format, feel free to add a zic-> VTIMEZONE format converter to the Olson package. Looks mostly like a bijective transform to me, except that the zic input files contain a lot of valuable comments that identify official reference documents. Only if the output of that converter on the regular updates of the Olson package turns out to be unsatisfactory, I would start worrying about setting up a parallel bureaucracy and an independent database. I see really no need for yet another mailing list.
RFC-2445 defines VTIMEZONE.
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:US--Fictitious-Eastern LAST-MODIFIED:19870101T000000Z BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:19671029T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:19870405T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=1SU;BYMONTH=4;UNTIL=19980404T070000Z TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:19990424T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=4 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE If people really think that this looks that much nicer or easier to parse for machines and humans ... Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>