From: Doug Royer [SMTP:doug@home.royer.com] Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 6:47 PM The timezones.external@software.com list is for public discussion of timezone information. How does that mailing list's charter differ from that of tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov, which is a list for public discussion of time zone information that has been in use since 1986? I visited www.software.com, but found no discussion of the new list. How does one join, or view its message archive? IANA as part of the IETF is looking into administrating the names of world wide time zones. How and why will this administration differ from the process already in place for the existing time zone database? 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). On 1998-07-16 Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca@renault.fr> wrote that he was implementing (1); you might ask him how far he got. 2) Convert the government database into VTIMEZONE records for IANA to administer. Isn't conversion automatic? If so, why would two databases need to be administered separately? One database should be generated automatically from the other. And if someone want to volunteer - make a converter to go from VTIMEZONE format to zic input format to keep the databases in sync. Why would this be necessary, if conversion is automatic? FYI, here is a brief summary of existing sources for time zone data: http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm And here is a copy of the tz mailing list archive: ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz