Official site for Australia Timezones

[Guy Harris]

On Oct 8, 2008, at 7:31 PM, Vilas Khare (vkhare) wrote:

> How does one keep informed about upcoming time zone and DST/STD rule  
> changes for various countries ?  We have a in-house application that  
> needs to convert local time to/from UTC for users around the globe  
> and thus need to keep track of when DST begins/ends for each time  
> zone.  We use ISO std. time zone conventions (ex. America/ 
> Los_Angeles, Australia/Melbourne etc).

I don't think there's an ISO standard for those time zone names -  
unless somebody standardized them in some official document, they're  
just the convention used by the current version of the Olson time zone  
database (and I think at least some systems using that database might  
not use that convention, e.g. Solaris).

As for keeping informed, that depends on what "keeping informed" means:

	if it means keeping absolutely up-to-the-minute about time zone  
rules, the only way to do that is to find out where various countries  
- or regions of countries - post notices about time zone rules, and  
monitor those sources;

	if it means keeping "reasonably" up-to-date, following this list, and  
picking up updates to the Olson database, would work;

	if it means keeping as up-to-date as the vendors of the OSes on which  
your application runs keep those OSes up to date, the application  
could use whatever APIs and databases the OSes use (not all of them  
use the Olson database - *most* UN*Xes do, but I don't think HP-UX  
does, and Windows definitely doesn't).