Subject: Re: New Mail List - [email-masked]

From: Markus Kuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 14:47:22 +0000

Doug Royer <[email-masked]>:
> There are three goals of this list.
> 
> 	1) Port the government database and 'zic' (Zone Information Compiler)
> 	   to other OS's and have it also provide the data in VTIMEZONE
> 	   format. Most UNIX's use the government database format and the zic
> 	   compiler (man zic).
> 
> 	2) Convert the government database into VTIMEZONE records for IANA
> 	   to administer.
> 
> 	3) Give away the results to the public domain.

There might be a few misunderstandings involved here. First, there is no
"government timezone database". What you see on ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/
is the collaboration of a number of volunteers (Arthur Olson, Paul
Eggert, et al.), the result of which is commonly referred to as the
public domain "Olson database". The only relation to the US government
is that the group has been using an ftp server of the National Cancer
Institute, which happens to be located in the .gov domain.

There exists already a well-established mailing list for discussions
on time zones and the maintenance of the Olson database, namely

  [email-masked]

Contact

  [email-masked]

to join the club.

Since there is a lot of accumulated expertise on this mailing list,
handing over the administration of the database to IANA seems to be a
rather dubious buerocratic effort. Who at IANA would take over authority
over the database and is really comparably qualified to the current
contributors of the Olson database who have done a splendid job for
the last 15 years?

Please understand that IANA is a registration service, while what the
group around Olson is doing is more a detective service that observes
and documents the highly complicated world of national and regional
decisions about time-zone changes in the world. If government X is going
to change its local time zone, it is more likely that the database
maintainer will hear about this from various informers or media reports
around the world, as well as resources such as IATA or CIA. It is much
less likely that the respective countries will report timezone changes
directly to IANA officially. A detective service can provide a more
accurate representation of the real world than a registration service.

Just dropping the maintenance of the time zone database into the
responsibility of IANA might give them a task they underestimate at the
moment.

If you don't like the current zic format, feel free to add a zic->
VTIMEZONE format converter to the Olson package. Looks mostly like a
bijective transform to me, except that the zic input files contain a lot
of valuable comments that identify official reference documents.

Only if the output of that converter on the regular updates of the Olson
package turns out to be unsatisfactory, I would start worrying about
setting up a parallel bureaucracy and an independent database. I see
really no need for yet another mailing list.

> RFC-2445 defines VTIMEZONE.

     BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
     TZID:US--Fictitious-Eastern
     LAST-MODIFIED:19870101T000000Z
     BEGIN:STANDARD
     DTSTART:19671029T020000
     RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10
     TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
     TZOFFSETTO:-0500
     TZNAME:EST
     END:STANDARD
     BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
     DTSTART:19870405T020000
     RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=1SU;BYMONTH=4;UNTIL=19980404T070000Z
     TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
     TZOFFSETTO:-0400
     TZNAME:EDT
     END:DAYLIGHT
     BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
     DTSTART:19990424T020000
     RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=4
     TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
     TZOFFSETTO:-0400
     TZNAME:EDT
     END:DAYLIGHT
     END:VTIMEZONE

If people really think that this looks that much nicer or easier to
parse for machines and humans ...

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

---

From: David Madeo <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 11:28:31 -0500

Hi,

Since I'm on both ietf-calendar (http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/) and a lurker
on the tz mailing list (ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/), perhaps I can offer a bit
of clarification here.  As everyone on both lists realizes, timezones is one of
the major "gotchas" of scheduling.

The tz list is indeed focused on the detective work of determining the changes in
timezones, both historical and current.  The ietf-calendar list is focused on
developing the standard representation of calendar data  and the protocols to
allow calendar applications to share calendar data easily.

In order to ensure that two calendar implementations can interoperate, both need
to look at the same database of timezones.   Since we're drafting the CAP
(Calendar Access Protocol) now, we need to point Calendar implementors at a
timezone standard, which of course doesn't exist.

The TZ database appears to be the closest thing available, an excellent example
of volunteers doing a much needed job.   The problem is how to reference it in an
RFC?

I won't speak for Doug, but I believe he intended to leverage the tz mailing list
and the packaged updates, but use the IANA as the "official" repository for
standards to reference.   The current tzdata ftp site, a US government
organization which has nothing to do with timezones, doesn't allow web pages.
Why not find a permanent home for this with the IANA (www.iana.org) which has
"Dedicated to preserving the central coordinating functions of the global
Internet for the public good" as its motto.

dmadeo

---

From: "Greg FitzPatrick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 17:53:27 +0100

There is obviously a lot to what you are saying Markus, but one point
remains to be resolved.  In the near future we are going to need legal
frameworks for access to machine-readable online resources.  Maybe that is
part of the effort Doug is talking about

And we are going to need mechanisms for creating and maintaining
aggregations such as the Olson, but that have some official binding to an
Authority.

Because otherwise people wont know who to sue!

BTW the IETF has a parent organization - ISOC, whose raison d´etre is to
protect the IETF  from the legal repercussions of their standards work.

Though it may seem ludicrously utopian at this time to plan for a network of
little bots zipping around from the Cook Islands to the Kingdom of Swat,
slurping up time zone rulings from each individual authority's machine
readable time zone database, that is exactly where we are heading, er,
eventually :-)

Compare that to this:

In Sweden, 78 district courts publish bankruptcy proceedings in a
machine-readable metadata format, any agent may crawl these sites or their
aggregations at regional levels and undertake actions on behalf of their
users based on their readings from these sites without any human
interference or approval.

One government chartered authorities site is charged with the official
machine-readable publishing of an aggregation of all 78 district courts.
Thousand of applications will undertake actions on their users behalf based
on their readings of this information, again with no human intermediation.

This is a non-utopian proposal which we are currently working on.

Depending on the degree of sophistication of each authorities infostructure,
bit for bit information will be transferred to machine collectable, machine
readable authoritive publishing.  Since there is already a sufficient level
of sophistication in some areas of the world such as the Kingdom of Sweden
to go forward with this work, I argue that we should do so and let The
Kingdom of Swat catch up when they can, which will of course guarantee lots
of exciting detective work for the next 50 years.

Agree on a machine readable publishing format and I will pop over to the
Department of Commerce and convince them to publish the official daylight
savings times of Sweden just to be the first ever to do so:-)

Greg

/btw that last paragraph was a gross exaggeration of my power to get things
done here:-)

---

From: Markus Kuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 18:22:20 +0000

> Because otherwise people wont know who to sue!

So what we have to do is to transform the Olson group into something
that looks like a sue-able entity, but nevertheless isn't sue-able.

There was actually some time ago already a discussion on the tz
mailing list to set up something that could be called the

  International Time Zone Information Centre

with a quotable web page, postal address, etc. It would essentially be
the old Olson Group, but there would be something like an "Annual Time
Zone Newsletter" that will be sent freely to places such as various
government ministries, intelligence agencies, news agencies, airline and
telecommunications associations (IATA, ITU, etc.), etc. The goal would
be to create a point of contact where governments and observers of
governments could centrally report time zone changes and also make sure
that knowledge of the centre and its current data base content spreads
to the right places.

The basic idea seemed to have been quite agreeable, but in the end there
simply wasn't anyone volunteering to handle the bureaucracy necessary to
set up such a small institution. If two or three industrial sponsors
would come forward to cover the in the end surely quite marginal running
costs of such a small organization, I am sure it would be possible to
set up a suitable quotable but not quite sueable body.

Publishing a single-page ISO standard that designates the named
organization to be the keeper of the ISO 16xyz time zone database would
surely sprinkle sufficient official magic around the entire thing to
keep even hard-line bureaucrats happy.

Markus