Normatively citing the TZ database

Jonathan Lennox lennox at cs.columbia.edu
Tue Aug 5 21:05:31 UTC 2003


I'm writing a specification for a language (the Call Processing Language,
for user-specific routing of telephone calls) which needs to support the
users' time zones for time-of-day routing.  (The current draft is available
at <http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~lennox/draft-ietf-iptel-cpl-07.txt> for
those who are interested.)

The draft includes the following paragraph:

   While "tzid" labels that do not begin with a forward slash are
   locally defined, it is RECOMMENDED that servers support at least the
   naming scheme used by Olson Time Zone database [9]. Examples of
   timezone databases that use the Olson scheme are the zoneinfo files
   on most Unix-like systems, and the standard Java TimeZone class.

Currently reference [9] refers to <http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm>,
which is tz-link.htm from tzcode.  I've been asked, though, whether this is
the best way to make reference to the TZ database; and I have to concede
that it might not be, since it's dependent on Twinsun's continuing support.

What would mailing list members suggest is the best (most canonical, most
stable) way of referencing the TZ database?

-- 
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs dot columbia dot edu



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