Update: URL of Time and Date Gateway changed

Paul Eggert eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU
Mon Mar 29 21:52:23 UTC 2004


> From: Peter Thoeny [mailto:peter.thoeny at attglobal.net] 
> Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 11:37 AM

> please update the link to "Time and Date Gateway"
> from http://www.bsdi.com/date to
> http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/xtra/tzdate. I am the admin of TWiki.org and
> inherited the date script from the BSDi folks since their web site is no
> longer in service.

Thanks very much for sending us this URL.  I'll include this update in
my next proposed patch.  I had been temporarily using
<http://www.earth.com/date/> as that's Tony Sanders's site, but my
vague impression was that he's no longer maintaining it.

A few minor suggestions.  First, this text is confusing:

   These are the ISO/IEC 9945-1 ANSI/IEEE Std 1003.1 (aka POSIX.1)
   timezone names, (per section 8.1.1 of that document).

None of the names on that page are specified by POSIX; they are all
extensions to POSIX defined by the Olson tz database.  Perhaps it'd be
better to simply refer to the Olson database
<http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm>.

Second:

  Greenwich Mean Time (GMT/UCT/UTC/Universal/Zulu):

  +12 +11 +10 +9 +8 +7 +6 +5 +4 +3 +2 +1 GMT -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12 -13

It'd be helpful here to mention that positive numbers count hours west
of GMT (which is opposite to the usual convention).

Third, the top level divisions (Africa, Atlantic, Indian, Antarctica,
...)  are not alphabetized; it'd be a bit clearer if they were.

Fourth, I wouldn't list the entries in the 'backward' file.  For
example, the Brazil/* entries are not a list of all the locations in
Brazil, as an ordinary reader would expect; they're merely a list of
old Brazilian backward-compatibility links.  It'd be simpler to omit
the 'backward' entries.

Finally, can you run NTP on that web server's host?  It's currently
running about 90 seconds slow.

Thanks again for the URL.



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