I'm forwarding this message from Phil Budne, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately. --ado -----Original Message----- From: Phil Budne [mailto:phil@ultimate.com] Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2011 5:33 To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: Comments and a question (VTIMEZONE from zoneinfo) Some meta-comments, some comments, and a question: The page at http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm says: "Please send corrections to this web page to the time zone mailing list." Reading the directory at http://www.twinsun.com/tz/ shows the html file hasn't changed since 2008-06-30. Until I checked the twinsun.com WHOIS entry and saw it's owned by (current tz editor) Paul Eggert, I was wondering about whether to trust the page at all! At some point I lost the twinsun URL, and couldn't find a link in any obvious places, like Wikipedia, or ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ So my first comment is, the tz-link page needs more meta information (eg; date of last change & author). If the tz-link page is being maintained, there should be visible links to it in obvious places, and if it isn't, the page should have a comment reflecting this. It would be useful to have a .html file at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ with current information, a link to current information, or at least a link to dated, but possibly useful information! Since this is my first public comment on the TZ list, let me express my long time admiration (I remember 4BSD when the rules were compiled into libc, and systems like TOPS-20, where they were in the "kernel") to all, past and present who have endeavored to make sense of this herculian problem (the proportions and magnitude of which are so truely perverse, that they could only have been made by mankind which, unlike nature, has no collective ability (or perhaps more succinctly or single authority powerful enough) to conform to Occam's Razor. As a side comment, there's nothing more Talmudic than commentary on commentary, so the appreciation of the tzdata files at http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-olsonzone... as talmudic is especially apropos! Finally, I know it's unlikely to change, but I find the fact that the tzdata tar files extract to the current directory (as opposed to creating a new directory) to be, to be kind "quaint". And I'll confess, I have a project that's so dated (a 1990's "finger" program, from back when exposing personal information on the Internet wasn't considered a problem) whose tar file is still available on my FTP server that has the same "charming" behavior of unloading it's contents into an unsuspecing extractor's current working directory. On to non-meta commentary: The link for "vzic": http://www.dachaplin.dsl.pipex.com/vzic/ is dead. There is a vzic project at: http://vzic.sourceforge.net/ and http://vzic.sourceforge.net/ Registered in 2006, and unchanged since 2010. http://code.google.com/p/tzurl/ says "This project is a fork of the vzic project." and appears to be under active development/maintenance. Related pages/projects are: http://tzurl.org/ which supplies "the latest Olson DB timezone definitions in iCalendar format" (generated using "tzurl") And "ical4j" http://code.google.com/p/ical4j/ "A suite of Java libraries for managing iCalendar and vCard data" and http://wiki.modularity.net.au/ical4j/index.php?title=Main_Page Which at http://wiki.modularity.net.au/ical4j/index.php?title=Timezones reads: iCal4j provides it's own TimeZone implementation as opposed to using the default Java timezone implementation. This is to ensure that all timezones in iCal4j can be accurately represented using a VTIMEZONE component in calendar data. The iCal4j timezone is essentially an implementation of java.util.TimeZone that is backed by a net.fortuna.ical4j.component.VTimeZone instance. Whilst a timezone instance may be created explicitly, typical usage is to obtain a TimeZoneRegistry instance and retrieve the timezone instance from the registry. And FINALLY, a question: Has anyone heard of code that reads binary tz data, and outputs VTIMEZONE info? Extracting rules for a specific year is sufficient. I can SWEAR I once saw an "unzic" program, but maybe I'm having a new bout of a particular form of senior moment I've experienced before, where I remember things that have never happened. We've been using vzic, but it isn't a great solution since RedHat Linux doesn't supply an RPM for the timezone source files that vzic needs to run, so we're stuck having to track version of the tzdata RPM on the specific version of RedHat that the product installs on. I got involved because I felt the seismic activity when the problem landed on the desk of an engineer without sufficient experience to grasp of the enormity of the hairball that had just hit him. Thanks Phil