Time zone suggestions for draft-ietf-calsch-ical-08.txt

[Antoine Leca]

Keith wrote:
>    How important is it for iCalendar timezones to work before 1998?

and Paul answered: 
> iCalendar should be able to handle the problems that occurred before
> 1998, because it's likely that similar problems will occur after 1998.

That is very true.
In my eyes, that means that the naming scheme for timezones should
be extensible.  Right, Paul?


> Besides, iCalendar should work for dates before 1998; I'd want to use
> it that way myself.  Why limit it to future dates?

Well, that is another point.
In my eyes, we should be able to use the mechanisms described in
iCalendar for any use, including in the past (and I hope it successed
on this way).

OTOH, the aim here is to do a world-wide repository about timezones
suitable for Internet scheduling, and here I believe the past problems
will be an additional weight with no useful properties.

Or should we have two repositories?
As you pointed out, my goal is to do an automatic tool that
"tranforms" the files at Olson database (tzdata19XXa.tar.gz,
not the ones produced by zic) to a database in iCal format
(and to Microsoft Win32's format as well).
Therefore, be this database served by an Internel protocol,
or be it used internaly with proprietary tools is IMHO a
personal choice.


Antoine