New home for time zone stuff by 2012?

Fri Aug 28 23:38:20 UTC 2009

There may be some misunderstanding here. While there are some
standardization efforts that are perscriptive, many standardization efforts
are targeted at "reflecting reality as closely as possible". The Unicode
Locales project, for example, aims at getting translations, date formats,
time formats, etc. on the basis of customary usage.

Mark

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 16:48, Robert Masters <RMasters at bunnings.com.au>wrote:

>
> Thank-you Russ!
>
> That is exactly the sort of response I was hoping for - why NOT to use
> my suggestion.
>
> Further, your suggestion has a number of very good points to support it.
>
> Eyrie.org has been around for a long time by net standards (over 10
> years now), and has always been well maintained and resourced. They
> provide the same benefits that Sourceforge offer, with none of the
> problems that the site currently suffers from. It is independent of a
> formal body, providing a separation from bureaucratic controls, and is
> likewise separated from an individual's place of employment.
>
> I do not think that moving the project under the umbrella of a standards
> or similar organistation will be of particular benefit, as the point of
> the project is to reflect reality as closely as possible, not to try to
> enforce a standard on reality. In many ways it requires the exact
> opposite of a standards body.
>
> Regards
>
> Rob Masters
> Unix Systems Administrator
>
> Bunnings Group Limited
> 126 Pilbara Street, Welshpool WA 6106
> Locked Bag 20, Welshpool WA 6986
> Phone: (08) 9365-1507
> E-mail : rmasters at bunnings.com.au
> Website: www.bunnings.com.au
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Russ Allbery [mailto:rra at stanford.edu]
> Sent: Friday, 28 August 2009 2:55 AM
> To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
> Subject: Re: New home for time zone stuff by 2012?
>
> "Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]" <olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov> writes:
>
> > I'll be eligible to start drawing a pension in mid-2012. Since I'm
> > accustomed to slow-moving Quaker process, that makes it time to get
> > serious about finding a new home for time zone stuff.
>
> > There are several pieces of the puzzle (some of which haven't seen
> > much work of late):
>
> >       Data maintenance
> >       Data distribution
> >       Code maintenance
> >       Code distribution
> >       Mailing list maintenance
> >       Mailing list hosting
> >       Standards work (for example, tweaking POSIX TZ environment
> variables so Godthab can be represented)
> >       Code enhancement (for example, year zero work and Julian
> calendar
> > work)
>
> Since it's been explicitly mentioned as a suggestion, I guess I'll be
> one to stand up and say that I'd really hate to see this work move to
> Sourceforge.  The Sourceforge site is riddled with advertising in ways
> that have gotten increasingly obnoxious over the years, it's slow, it's
> often buggy, and the mailing lists that it hosts have historically also
> mangled outgoing messages with even more advertising.
>
> In the name of not complaining about something without offering an
> alternative:
>
> Moving from hosting based on the current maintainer to hosting based on
> another individual may not be the best approach, and I certainly
> understand if people would prefer something more distributed that makes
> it easier to have continuity of access.  However, I'm willing to host
> the infrastructure for continuing to distribute and discuss the timezone
> database personally, particularly as an alternative to seeing it move to
> Sourceforge.
>
> eyrie.org is my personal domain, independent of any employment of mine,
> and can offer:
>
> * Mailing list hosting (via Mailman)
> * Mailing list maintenance (I'm willing to review the moderation queue)
> * Data distribution via archives.eyrie.org / ftp.eyrie.org
> * Code distribution via archives.eyrie.org / ftp.eyrie.org
>
> If the number of downloads of the source and data is in excess of a few
> GiB a day of network traffic averaged over a month, hosting the
> distribution is a bit trickier, but I think it's unlikely that would be
> the case.  That's over 10,000 downloads of the tarball a day, and I
> suspect nearly all users get it via distributions or other sources.
>
> If whoever is doing the maintenance would like to use a revision control
> system, I'm happy to host the repository with the caveat that I would
> like to keep the number of people with access small and restricted to
> people whose identities I can be reasonably assured about, since I don't
> have the distributed hosting facilities of a Sourceforge or the like.
> If the intention is to move to a more open commit model, it would
> probably be better to explore an option like GitHub, Savannah, or a
> similar project hosting provider.  If the project would stay with a
> single committer who just needs a place to upload things, I can
> certainly provide that.
>
> --
> Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)
> <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ <http://www.eyrie.org/%7Eeagle/>>
>
>
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