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Timezone Maintainer Retiring

Posted by timothy on from the sunset-clause-means-it's-noon-all-over dept.

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."

7 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Definition of awesome by BeShaMo · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Definition of awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. So long... by eexaa · · Score: 5, Funny

    ....and thanks for all the zones.

  3. Re:bored legislators by vossman77 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  4. You know it's an old Sun workstation... by PinchDuck · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  5. Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? by Pingmaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:bored legislators by nthwaver · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?