On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 08:43, Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

An ancestor of the current tzdata was posted to the usenet mod.sources newsgroup with a date of March 7, 1986; I found copies at:

Fantastic. I got the idea that Usenet was the next place to go, but I had to catch a bus so I put the initial part up to let people know what I was working on. Annoyingly the reason I threw my work up on github in a hurry last night was because I was going to Galway last night. Now I'm here and while I have the CDROM *cases* of the first three volumes of the Walnut Creek Usenet Source Code archive, I suspect the CDROMs themselves are back in Dublin. Argh. Anyway, thanks for the links. Any additional early releases I find will have similar style commits - correct authors, timestamps and message ids. I'm downloading the comp.sources.unix archives now and will get the mod.sources archives next. Was settz posted on alt.sources prior to mod.sources? As for the points raised by other posters - US based hosts and preserving SCCS history... First, I chose github just for a quick place to push the repo. I obviously have the full copy (and more importantly the scripts used to generate it which I'll push up later today) and I'm in Ireland. It lives in a VM on my laptop and I've pushed out all the materials I used to build the repo to a few other machines in other countries. I have two thoughts on US based servers. First, there are a host of other projects on github that have these files in some form so I'm not really concerned. Second, this repository is a work in progress that folks here can evaluate in terms of its structure (see the README for the issues I'd like feedback on). It's my belief that I should send my repo generation scripts and supporting metadata to kre (or ado or eggert) and have them generate the repo that people actually use. Lastly I completely agree that the SCCS history should be preserved if possible. However I don't think I can get access to it without cause ado or eggert a lot of problems. I think I know how to weave in SCCS commits into the resulting git tree. Essentially the algorithm will go something like this (in shell/pythony pseudo code): for commit, next_commit in list_of_tags; do start_date=# get date of this commit end_date=# get date of next commit # get list of changes in sccs repository between those dates # for each change, get the date, commit message and diff # apply diff to repo, commit with correct date and metadata git rebase next_commit done How to do this will depend on what ado actually uses - SCCS or RCS or if he migrated from one to the other at some point. I also suspect there are some tweaks that will be required (I'm not sure how rebase deals with empty commits for instance and if everything is working correctly every rebase will cause an empty commit). And obviously when that happens everyone would need to resync their tree. But I'm happy to help make it happen. In the meantime I'll get the scripts and data kre needs to generate a repo that he can make a "blessed" repository for his own use (and wherever he chooses to publish it - if anywhere). Well, first I'll get the pre-93 sources and the tzcode in there first. Kevin