isnt the term TIMEZONE a term of art specific to Time Keeping as a science? I thought it was. So what is the issue - proper English then to hide terms which are specific to this realm? todd On 7/3/2014 1:45 AM, Tobias Conradi wrote:

Mr. Daboo,

would be nice if you could fix "timezone" to "time zone".

Tobias Conradi

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Jon Skeet* <skeet@pobox.com <mailto:skeet@pobox.com>> Date: Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 9:39 PM Subject: Re: [tz] Fwd: [apps-discuss] Proposed working group: Timezone Data Distribution Service (tzdist) To: Mike Douglass <mikeadouglass@gmail.com <mailto:mikeadouglass@gmail.com>> Cc: "tz@iana.org <mailto:tz@iana.org> Mailing List" <tz@iana.org <mailto:tz@iana.org>>

I suppose it's too late to ask them to split "timezone" into "time zone" everywhere in their documentation etc? Just a minor peeve, but...

On 2 July 2014 20:13, Mike Douglass <mikeadouglass@gmail.com <mailto:mikeadouglass@gmail.com>> wrote:

People on this list may be interested in the following.

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [apps-discuss] Proposed working group: Timezone Data Distribution Service (tzdist) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:06:51 -0400 From: Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org> <mailto:barryleiba@computer.org> To: Apps Discuss <apps-discuss@ietf.org> <mailto:apps-discuss@ietf.org>

Cyrus Daboo has proposed a new working group in the Applications Area, and I'm initiating charter discussion on it:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-tzdist/

We'll have the charter discussion here on apps-discuss. Assuming a working group comes out of this, we'll create a new mailing list for the actual work, once the charter is done.

Comments on this charter are welcome. I expect to put it on the 10 July IESG telechat for initial approval, after which it will go out for IETF and external review. So, comments here by 4 July, please.

Barry, Applications AD

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http://tobiasconradi.com

On 3 Jul 2014, at 04:58, Mike Douglass <mikeadouglass@gmail.com> wrote:

You said in your referenced message

...

This may not be a big deal for users in the United States, or in Europe, where DST rules are changing only very rarely.

However, in scheduling, you may be in the US but an attendee might be in Argentina which also has the tendency to wait till the last moment. So we're all potentially affected by tz changes.

It’s worse than that. Fortunately I’m not in any support orrganisation, but a timezone changes can affect an organisation’s ability to provide 24 hour support coverage. Where there was previously overlap between two centres, there’s now a gap. Any of the multi-national corporations are going to be affected in one way or another if they have any kind of presence in a country that makes timezone changes.

It seems odd that tz data is treated like code to be updated as system patches when it changes.

I have some sympathy with that.

On 07/02/2014 04:37 PM, Martin Burnicki wrote:

...

Mike,

Mike Douglass wrote:

...

People on this list may be interested in the following.

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [apps-discuss] Proposed working group: Timezone Data Distribution Service (tzdist) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:06:51 -0400 From: Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org> To: Apps Discuss <apps-discuss@ietf.org>

Cyrus Daboo has proposed a new working group in the Applications Area, and I'm initiating charter discussion on it:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-tzdist/

We'll have the charter discussion here on apps-discuss. Assuming a working group comes out of this, we'll create a new mailing list for the actual work, once the charter is done.

Comments on this charter are welcome. I expect to put it on the 10 July IESG telechat for initial approval, after which it will go out for IETF and external review. So, comments here by 4 July, please.

This sounds interesting. I've proposed some ideas some time one the tz mailing list. See: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-August/019521.html

Martin

On 3 July 2014 09:11, Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Perhaps it should be rethought at this point (in a fashion that don't involve changing every program that uses localtime() or mktime(), of course; requiring a change doesn't help).

Oh no, localtime() and especially mktime() very much need to change, or rather to be replaced. The POSIX spec so poorly defines mktime() behaviour that Windows and Mac have completely opposite behaviours for ambiguous times during the daylight to standard time transition, and the Linux behaviour is non-deterministic. Windows assumes you mean the second occurrence or standard time, Mac assumes you mean the first occurrence or daylight time (well, for the first 47 or so minutes, after that it assumes standard time!), and Linux just outright guesses based on what the last calculation it did returned. Also setting the daylight/standard flag manually returns inconsistent results and really shouldn't be able to be manually set, we should set first/second occurrence instead. And a dozen other different issues that wouldn't exist if they had been defined in modern times... Well, I digress, these are the complaints of a cross-platform C++ toolkit developer who needs consistent behaviour from his standards and doesn't get any. John.

Are you proposing an IETF WG then to standardize it? We proposed adding Time Zone representation with the STIME WG way back when but PKIX stomped that idea for some reason. Todd On 7/3/2014 1:11 AM, Guy Harris wrote:

On Jul 2, 2014, at 8:58 PM, Mike Douglass <mikeadouglass@gmail.com> wrote:

...

It seems odd that tz data is treated like code to be updated as system patches when it changes. If you mean "like code to be updated as system patches when it changes, rather than like a database to be accessed over the Intertubes", bear in mind that, back in 1987, when the tz database and sample code was originally created, Internet access was a lot less common than it is today. (I seem to remember the point at which Sun, where I was working at the time, got access to the ARPANET.)

If the tz database were to have been designed in the late 1990's or early 2000's, a number of things might have been done differently - but it *wasn't* designed then. Perhaps it should be rethought at this point (in a fashion that don't involve changing every program that uses localtime() or mktime(), of course; requiring a change doesn't help).

(And, frankly, it's arguably a bit scary that some embedded systems *are* connected to the Intertubes, but I digress....)