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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."
You know you're awesome when IANA have to develop a transitioning strategy when you retire.
...assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not.
So it was magical server elves all along!
All rites reversed 2010
An allusion to what?
....and thanks for all the zones.
The "literary appreciation" article is really first rate.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
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.
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.
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:
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.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
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.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
-- Sig down
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...
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."
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
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.
Penny - plain text accounting
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 [...]