while it's not strictly related, i've often found myself wondering if adding the date of the adoption of the gregorian reform for a given region to the compiled zone file might be of interest. i recently worked over cal(1) in netbsd to remove the places where 1752/09/03 was "hard-coded" as the date of the adoption of the reform, adding in it's place a nice list of dates for various places, and demoted 1752/09/03 to a mere default. as a result, i can ask cal to show me the calendar at the time that italy adopted the reform (1582/10/05), or japan (1872/12/20). note that i did not attempt to handle things like sweden from 1700-1712. it struck me that the tz data base would not be an unreasonable place to store the "local" date at which the gregorian reform took place (modulo the various cantons in switzerland and the parts of germany that were protestant in the 16th century). crazy? -- |-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----| codewarrior@daemon.org * "ah! i see you have the internet twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown) that goes *ping*!" werdna@squooshy.com * "information is power -- share the wealth."