Dear Paul, thank you for the suggestions. All done except for the 'backward' ones. Please let me know which regions are backward so that I can take them out. FYI, I inherited the script from Jeff Polk. Regards, Peter Paul Eggert wrote:

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From: Peter Thoeny [mailto:peter.thoeny@attglobal.net] Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 11:37 AM

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please update the link to "Time and Date Gateway" from http://www.bsdi.com/date to http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/xtra/tzdate. I am the admin of TWiki.org and inherited the date script from the BSDi folks since their web site is no longer in service.

Thanks very much for sending us this URL. I'll include this update in my next proposed patch. I had been temporarily using <http://www.earth.com/date/> as that's Tony Sanders's site, but my vague impression was that he's no longer maintaining it.

A few minor suggestions. First, this text is confusing:

These are the ISO/IEC 9945-1 ANSI/IEEE Std 1003.1 (aka POSIX.1) timezone names, (per section 8.1.1 of that document).

None of the names on that page are specified by POSIX; they are all extensions to POSIX defined by the Olson tz database. Perhaps it'd be better to simply refer to the Olson database <http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm>.

Second:

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT/UCT/UTC/Universal/Zulu):

+12 +11 +10 +9 +8 +7 +6 +5 +4 +3 +2 +1 GMT -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12 -13

It'd be helpful here to mention that positive numbers count hours west of GMT (which is opposite to the usual convention).

Third, the top level divisions (Africa, Atlantic, Indian, Antarctica, ...) are not alphabetized; it'd be a bit clearer if they were.

Fourth, I wouldn't list the entries in the 'backward' file. For example, the Brazil/* entries are not a list of all the locations in Brazil, as an ordinary reader would expect; they're merely a list of old Brazilian backward-compatibility links. It'd be simpler to omit the 'backward' entries.

Finally, can you run NTP on that web server's host? It's currently running about 90 seconds slow.

Thanks again for the URL.

Thanks for the list. Done for most of them. FYI, TWiki.org is currently hosted at SourceForge. The time is inaccurate across the 5 load balanced servers they have. I send a support request to fix that, https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=200001&aid=923661&group_id... We plan to move TWiki.org to a dedicated server. At that time we have better control and can sync the time. Regards, Peter Paul Eggert wrote:

Peter Thoeny <peter.thoeny@attglobal.net> writes:

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thank you for the suggestions. All done except for the 'backward' ones. Please let me know which regions are backward so that I can take them out.

Basically, it's column 3 of the 'backward' file that you can get from <ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2003e.tar.gz>. Here are the contents of that column, as of today:

America/Atka America/Ensenada America/Fort_Wayne America/Knox_IN America/Porto_Acre America/Rosario America/Virgin Asia/Ashkhabad Asia/Chungking Asia/Dacca Asia/Macao Asia/Ujung_Pandang Asia/Tel_Aviv Asia/Thimbu Asia/Ulan_Bator Australia/ACT Australia/Canberra Australia/LHI Australia/NSW Australia/North Australia/Queensland Australia/South Australia/Tasmania Australia/Victoria Australia/West Australia/Yancowinna Brazil/Acre Brazil/DeNoronha Brazil/East Brazil/West Canada/Atlantic Canada/Central Canada/East-Saskatchewan Canada/Eastern Canada/Mountain Canada/Newfoundland Canada/Pacific Canada/Saskatchewan Canada/Yukon Chile/Continental Chile/EasterIsland Cuba Egypt Eire Europe/Tiraspol GB GB-Eire GMT+0 GMT-0 GMT0 Greenwich Hongkong Iceland Iran Israel Jamaica Japan Kwajalein Libya Mexico/BajaNorte Mexico/BajaSur Mexico/General Navajo NZ NZ-CHAT Pacific/Samoa Poland Portugal PRC ROC ROK Singapore Turkey UCT US/Alaska US/Aleutian US/Arizona US/Central US/East-Indiana US/Eastern US/Hawaii US/Indiana-Starke US/Michigan US/Mountain US/Pacific US/Samoa UTC Universal W-SU Zulu

Dear Paul, thanks for the update and for listing the site. I made some changes, Indiana and Kentucky are now correct. (Still debugging North_Dakota, it is in the directory but for some reason the script is not picking it up.) As previously noted, TWiki.org is hosted on SourceForge; the tz database does not seem to be up to date. Once we move TWiki to our own server I can fix that. Regards, Peter Paul Eggert wrote:

I just now updated <http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm> to point to that page.

I noticed one other minor problem with that web page: it mishandles zones whose names contain two or more slashes. For example, the web page has an entry 'Indiana' but when I follow the link to the URL <http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/xtra/t?tz=America/Indiana> the resulting web page says "Invalid Timezone: America/Indiana -- /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Indiana".

The affected zones are:

America/Indiana/Knox America/Indiana/Marengo America/Indiana/Vevay America/Kentucky/Monticello America/North_Dakota/Center

I see the web page doesn't list any name related to America/North_Dakota/Center, which was added in tz-2001d. Nor does it list other recently-added names like America/Bahia (added in tz-2003d). Perhaps you're using a old version of the tz data, or an old version of the tz names? You can get the current list of names from zone.tab in the tz distribution.

This suggests another possible improvement: at the bottom of the web page you might list the tz version number or some other time stamp associated with the tz table itself. Unfortunately there's no easy way to get the tz version number from the installed data.

These are common-enough problems that I'll CC: this to the tz list.