Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 11:50:57 -0700 (PDT) From: ncm@cantrip.org (Nathan Myers) One solution would be a network of TZ servers that can hand out up-to-date fragments of the database on demand, similar to DNS service.... Probably the IETF should be involved in this last bit ... Mike Carney of Sun has drafted a proposal along these lines. See: M. W. Carney DHCP Option for IEEE 1003.1 POSIX Timezone Specifications ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-dhc-timezone-03.txt (1997-07-30) That draft handles only POSIX-style TZ strings. On July 31 I sent comments to Carney suggesting that support be added for Olson-style strings, and he responded favorably. A copy of those comments is in <ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz> (look for the string "<199708010208.TAA09225@shade.twinsun.com>"). However, neither Carney's draft nor my comments addressed the problem of incremental update of time zone rules. I'll forward a brief summary of your suggestion to Carney; please feel free to get further involved as well.