Since I'm on both ietf-calendar (http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/) and a lurker on the tz mailing list (ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/), perhaps I can offer a bit of clarification here.  As everyone on both lists realizes, timezones is one of the major "gotchas" of scheduling.

The tz list is indeed focused on the detective work of determining the changes in timezones, both historical and current.  The ietf-calendar list is focused on developing the standard representation of calendar data  and the protocols to allow calendar applications to share calendar data easily.

In order to ensure that two calendar implementations can interoperate, both need to look at the same database of timezones.   Since we're drafting the CAP (Calendar Access Protocol) now, we need to point Calendar implementors at a timezone standard, which of course doesn't exist.

The TZ database appears to be the closest thing available, an excellent example of volunteers doing a much needed job.   The problem is how to reference it in an RFC?

I won't speak for Doug, but I believe he intended to leverage the tz mailing list and the packaged updates, but use the IANA as the "official" repository for standards to reference.   The current tzdata ftp site, a US government organization which has nothing to do with timezones, doesn't allow web pages.   Why not find a permanent home for this with the IANA (www.iana.org) which has "Dedicated to preserving the central coordinating functions of the global Internet for the public good" as its motto.

dmadeo
 

Markus Kuhn wrote:

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.

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?

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/>