Timezone Maintainer Retiring

linuxwrangler writes "It's used in Java. It's used in nearly every flavor of UNIX/Linux. In PostgreSQL, Oracle and other databases. Several RFCs refer to it. But where does the timezone database come from? I never gave it much thought but would have assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not. Since the inception of the database Arthur David Olson has maintained the database, coordinated the mailing list and volunteers and provided a release platform and now he is retiring. IANA is developing a transition strategy. Jon Udell has an interesting literary appreciation of the timezone database."

Comments

where are the comments?

[joeme1]

I keep refreshing, but there are no comments. How am I supposed to learn anything about this subject if there are not comments?

Re:where are the comments?

[chill]

Well, in the tradition of something as old school as the timezone database, why don't you RTFA?

Re:where are the comments?

[MrEricSir]

We'd leave comments, but it's midnight here. Or at least, that's what my computer clock is telling me all of a sudden.

Re:where are the comments?

[chill]

I don't know. I was hoping you'd read it and tell me. :-)

Definition of awesome

[BeShaMo]

You know you're awesome when IANA have to develop a transitioning strategy when you retire.

Re:Definition of awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

It's posts like this that make me lament only being able to spend one mod point at a time!

Re:Definition of awesome

[icebike]

But the other scary part is any random bus could have run over this guy any time in the past, and
nobody seems to have been prepared for that.

One wonders how many other situations like this exist, where critical system tools are basically handled by one person, or a tiny group. This is the second time in the last few years where I've been made aware of such a thing. When Reiser went to prison an entire file system essentially died on the vine (yes I still use it on some machines). So apparently it happens more often than we expect.

The worrisome bit is that we probably don't have any good database of critical component maintainers and their backup maintainers. The guy who maintained that database probably DID get hit by a bus.

Re:Definition of awesome

[dunng808]

One wonders how many other situations like this exist, where critical system tools are basically handled by one person, or a tiny group.

When Unix was on its way to becoming a document processing system the programmer who wrote the formatter was killed in an auto accident. The team that took up the task of completing the program found his code so impenetrable that they abandoned it and started over. The original formatter was named roff, short for run off. The replacement was named nroff, new run off. IIRC this made Unix late for its premier as a document processing system. Eventually this was rewritten to be open-source, and named groff, which is still used to format man pages. Definitely deserving the title of useful software, but is there anyone out there who really understands how it works? All those traps and triggers?

Re:Definition of awesome

[icebike]

Yes, yes, yest, this is well known, and careful reading would have revealed I still use it as well.

I'm not sure the posturing is helpful here.

Make no mistake, its dying on the vine. It will not get any fixes, it does not handle some multiprocessor environments (or was it NSF, I forget the details), and it has no formal maintainers. (Opensuse project used to do this, but its largely frozen reiserfs where it is). You use it at the state it was in at the last release and it works well, but don't expect it to even appear in vary many future kernel releases.

You can get the source and maintain it yourself. And in truth it needs little maintainable as long as you use it where it excells. It need never die. But don't expect any enhancements. There are many reports of existing reiser partitions being totally unusable after upgrading to some Opensuse 11 versions.

Re:Definition of awesome

[iris-n]

When Reiser went to prison an entire file system essentially died on the vine (yes I still use it on some machines). So apparently it happens more often than we expect.

Perhaps that can be used as a measure of importance: Important projects can survive the death of their founder.

Re:Definition of awesome

[FiloEleven]

You know you read too much Slashdot when you read "IANA" and your internal parser breaks because it isn't followed by a noun. =(

Re:Definition of awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

this is 100% bullshit.

osanna died of a heart attack, and it was rewritten so it would be in c
rather than pdp assembly.

http://www.netadmintools.com/html/7roff.man.html

How does the fridge lamp work, really?

[Ceriel Nosforit]

...assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not.

So it was magical server elves all along!

Re:How does the fridge lamp work, really?

[gstoddart]

So it was magical server elves all along!

No, this was a server wizard. I can only imagine the beard that comes along with this guy.

Kudos to the wise ones who have kept everything going.

Re:'bout time

[MozeeToby]

An allusion to what?

So long...

[eexaa]

....and thanks for all the zones.

Outstanding

[SPrintF]

The "literary appreciation" article is really first rate.

bored legislators

[magarity]

The database itself is updated approximately twenty times per year, depending on the year, based on information these experts provide to the maintainer.
 
Governments of the world have too much time on their hands if they average fiddling with local time zones 20 times per year.

Re:bored legislators

[camperdave]

Given how fast regime changes are happening these days, it's not that surprising.

Re:bored legislators

[tlhIngan]

Governments of the world have too much time on their hands if they average fiddling with local time zones 20 times per year.

Better than trying to get stuff done - ever notice that when government is busy fighting amongst themselves your life improves because they're not coming up with new ways to screw it up?

Of course, the real reason for the frequent updates is simply aggregating all the updates from the various governments. Daylight Saving Time being one of the worst since many (most?) countries don't have any sort of standardized start and stop dates - they just get planned and announced, and they change yearly.

It's a surprise the C library that uses these files can manage to keep all the time accounting straight...

Re:bored legislators

[vossman77]

Governments of the world have too much time on their hands if they average fiddling with local time zones 20 times per year.

You are certainly right about the most recent update, "Mercer County, North Dakota, changed from the mountain time zone to the central time zone." But the changes are not always recent changes. Recent ChangeLog from Fedora 14 Updates:

* Wed Feb 9 2011 Petr Machata - 2011b-1
- Upstream 2011b:
    - America/North_Dakota/Beulah: Mercer County, North Dakota, changed
        from the mountain time zone to the central time zone
* Mon Jan 24 2011 Petr Machata - 2011a-1
- Upstream 2011a:
    - Updates of historical stamps for Hawaii
* Tue Nov 9 2010 Petr Machata - 2010o-1
- Upstream 2010o:
    - Fiji will end DST on March 6, 2011, not March 27, 2011
* Wed Oct 27 2010 Petr Machata - 2010n-1
- Upstream 2010m:
    - Hong Kong didn't observe DST in 1977
    - In zone.tab, remove obsolete association of Vostok Station with
        South Magnetic Pole; add association with Lake Vostok
- Upstream 2010n:
    - Change end of DST in Samoa in 2011 from 2011-04-03 0:00 to
        2011-04-03 1:00
* Mon Aug 16 2010 Petr Machata - 2010l-2
- Upstream 2010l:
    - Change Cairo's 2010 reversion to DST from the midnight between
        September 8 and 9 to the midnight between September 9 and 10.
    - Change Gaza's 2010 return to standard time to the midnight between
        August 10 and 11.
    - Bahia de Banderas (Mexican state of Nayarit) changed time zone
        UTC-7 to new time zone UTC-6 on April 4, 2010

Re:bored legislators

[nthwaver]

It's a surprise the C library that uses these files can manage to keep all the time accounting straight...

It's not that complicated. They all translate into offsets in seconds. To the computer, I don't live in America/Los_Angeles on 3:47pm Thu March 3, 2011. The computer sees:

1299196020 (unix time in UTC)
- 28800 (my zone offset in seconds, using the tz database)
+ 0 (no DST in my zone right now)
= 1299167220 (local time)

So the really impressive work has just been in conceptualizing and organizing the database so that a program just needs to lookup two questions: which of the zones am I in, and what is the current offset for that zone?

Re:fuck timezones

[Tumbleweed]

now is the time to replace timezones with a countdown...

Yes...the Final Countdown!

Re:'bout time

[oldhack]

Lunch time.

Other potential hosts/sponsors

[plcurechax]

I would expect US NIST Time & Frequency division or US Naval Observatory Time department would be more than willing and able to host the zoneinfo database. Otherwise the time-nuts would likely step in and offer their support. A number of them being long time Unix folk, they wouldn't be total strangers to IANA or various national time authorities.

Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[wolrahnaes]

No disrespect to the man and the effort that must have gone in to creating this, but from a rational perspective we shouldn't need more than one more update ever. Unfortunately as a population we seem to be far too dumb to handle the idea of moving away from something we've done for a long time to something that makes more sense.

Here's all we need for a logical, permanent time solution:

• Eliminate useless crap like Daylight Savings Time. Legal noon and solar noon should have the same offset every day of the year. If you believe that shifting schedules with the seasons has a useful impact, changing your alarm is just as easy as changing your clock. 12 hour clocks should be phased out officially as well, they serve no purpose but confusion.
• Define a set of purely geographical time zones, equally sized to some chosen chunk of time (likely one hour in keeping with current general practice). Names should be simple and non-political, personally I favor just the standard UTC+/-x:xx format.
• Geographical time zones should then be assigned to countries based purely on physical location. Where a country crosses a geographical time zone line, it should keep its normal time zone unless it goes significantly in to the next one.
• Where two or more time zones are in use by a country, they should be assigned over as large of political subdivisions as reasonable. Using the US as an example, I'd mainly ride the state lines unless a state had significant ground in multiple geographical zones, then go to county by county if a state needed to be split.

I'm sure there are a few odd cases where exceptions to these guidelines would make sense, and I'm not against it in those cases, but the way we handle time zones now is completely irrational.

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[nschubach]

Why not just eliminate timezones and switch over to GMT/UTC time? Does 12:00 absolutely have to be when the sun is at it's peak?

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[h4rr4r]

This.
While we are at it, time and date will now be represented in the form YYYYMMDDHHmmss and so on. This would bring it into conformance with all other numbers we use.

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Swatch Internet Time?

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[nthwaver]

The tz database is meant to keep track of present and historical changes. Your proposed changes would not simplify anything - they'd only make the tz database bigger.

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[Pingmaster]

Let's say you live your life in New York, where the sun is at it's peak at 7am (UTC -5 hours, 12:00pm-5 = 7:00am). You are used to waking up at 2am, having lunch at 7am and going to bed at 6pm. You then travel overseas, where the sun peaks at 1:00pm (UTC +1 hour). Now, instead of setting your watch and waiting for jet lag to run it's course, you now have to re-wire your brain to continuously remember to eat lunch at 1pm, not supper and that bedtime is somewhere around midnight.

At least with time zones (as fucked up as the current system is), you can travel anywhere, set your clock to the local time and have a general estimation of the day. Wake up at 6-7am, eat lunch at noon, supper at 5 or 6, go to bed around 11. Makes things much easier on our dumb little brains.

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe i'm just a decadent libertine, but i generally eat when i'm hungry, and sleep when i'm tired

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[gsgriffin]

You just brought a smile to a private pilot. Can't tell you how big a pain it is to fly across zones and file flight plans. Every pilot would dream of one zone. Everybody else can't imagine the chaos that would cause. Forget Y2K, that would freak'n cause the world to shut down and cry.

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[Coppit]

I totally agree! Now that we've settled that, let's fix tension in the middle east.

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[initialE]

Look at it from another perspective - would it be easier to coordinate the changing of working and operating hours twice a year, every year, or easier to change the definition of time altogether, and force compliance from everyone?

Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap?

[Darinbob]

Slinkies for everyone! Who can fight when they're playing with a Slinky?

Happy Retirement

[Neanderthal Ninny]

Have a happy retirement "Father Time". I wish Arthur David Olson well and a good time off.
Thank you Arthur David Olson for keeping all of the timezones in the world for this many years which is thankless and somewhat of a painful job which has to navigate through all of those governments in the world.
Again thank you Arthur David Olson/

Jon Postel

[ivoras]

I believe something similar happened when Jon Postel signed off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel). For a while, he *was* the IANA.

You know your technology has stopped being a frontier when pioneers like these get replaced by commitees. Globally, it's not necessarily a bad thing, just a sign of times.

You know it's an old Sun workstation...

[PinchDuck]

under his desk, with a note taped to it that says "DO NOT TURN OFF".

That time in 1994 when some clod spilled coke on his desk almost brought it down, but TZ Guy was able to dive under his desk with his shirt off to soak up the spill before it started screwing things up...

Better yet

[gsgriffin]

Wait! How about just moving to UNIX time stamps. " I'll meet you at 1299198176 at the coffee shop...give or take a few thousand."

Take a look at the source for this thing

[massysett]

I remember looking at the source for this package when I was in New York City to run the marathon. It was held the morning the clocks went back to standard time, and I was wondering if my computer was up to date. I looked at the source of the timezone data package and it was filled with all sorts of gems. For instance

# From Paul Eggert (2001-03-06):
# Daylight Saving Time was first suggested as a joke by Benjamin Franklin
# in his whimsical essay ``An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost
# of Light'' published in the Journal de Paris (1784-04-26).
# Not everyone is happy with the results:

The comments are very instructive and the rules are all in plain text so I could easily discern that, yes, my system was up to date so that it would switch back to standard time on the first Sunday in November. (I gave up though when I realized that I wasn't sure what my cron daemon would do!)

On Debian just do apt-get source tzdata.

Oh, another good place to look for the oddities that are buried in your Unix system is to go to "info date" and follow the "Date input formats" node.

Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had
some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to
make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done
better than handing down our present system.

Great easter eggs in Unix.

True, GP is b*shit...

[xded]

Mod parent up, since I'm losing that ability to post a better history.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=roff&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html#HISTORY

Osanna first [roff] version was written in the PDP-11 assembly language and released in 1973. Brian Kernighan joined the roff development by rewriting it in the C programming language. The C version was released in 1975.

[...]

After Osanna had died in 1977 by a heart-attack at the age of about 50, Kernighan went on with developing troff. The next milestone was to equip troff with a general interface to support more devices, the intermediate output format and the postprocessor system. This com- pleted the structure of a roff system as it is still in use today [...]