FW: Who ist the maintainer of tzdata?

[David Keegel]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 02:25:04PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> These days I do most of the work in coordinating the maintenance of
> the tz data.
> 
> Alois Treindl <alois at astro.ch> writes:
> 
> > - add more details for the complicated timezone history of some countries,
> > e.g. Canada, where other sources have identified more than 250 regions with
> > different timezone history, whereas current tzdata has only 15 regions.
> 
> These are both quite worthy projects.  Yay!
> 
> To my mind, the second is easier.  The main thing is to identify each
> region, give it a name suitable for the tz scheme (given the number of
> regions, I'd suggest 3-level names like "America/Ontario/Nipigon",
> much as we already do for Indiana), and to record the data in tz
> format (i.e., format suitable for the zic program
> <http://www.linuxinfor.com/english/man8/zic.html>).

Paul (and interested others),

Assuming you had these timezone histories for places which differed
pre-1970 but have not differed port-1970, and assuming they were in
tz format and in the public domain, what would you do with them?

Is the idea is to integrate them into the tz database?
If so, would they be put in existing source files like northamerica,
europe, australasia as new zones?
Or would they be zones in a separate source file?
(Maybe called something like "historical"?)
Or just have the information as comments?

I think there is something to be said for a separate source file,
which need only be zic'ed by users who really want those zones.
I can imagine lots of Canadians being confused by a choice of
hundreds of different time zones, for example.

___________________________________________________________________________
 David Keegel <djk at cybersource.com.au>  http://www.cyber.com.au/users/djk/
 Cybersource P/L: Linux/Unix Systems Administration Consulting/Contracting