[tz] Introduction and apology for slamming you "with that TZ is a legal thing" commentary out of the blue.

[Peter Ilieve]

On 20 Oct 2011, at 17:41, Todd Glassey wrote:

> What needs to happen I believe is that this effort should define a process wherein any legal authority can request a IANA update to the data base and have that processed in a fixed timeframe outside of any continued IETF review. This is not an excuse to make a new IETF WG to control the world... its about letting the world operate in a manner which doesnt impose the IETF's judgement or political opinions on anyone either.

Matybe you should rope in the United Nations as well. :-)

Assuming you managed to set up this mechanism where a legal authority
can make requests, how many requests do you think would get made?
My guess would be hardly any, maybe even zero. Based on my reading of
this list over many years, lots of governments can barely be trusted
to tell their own citizens what will happen to the clocks. They
probably won't be interested in contacting a bunch of geeks like
us, even if they knew we existed.

That's not a dig at "less developed" governments. I provided some of
the data for the UK over the years. When I was speaking to the civil
servants in the relevant government department I would tell them
why I was asking about this stuff. They were uninterested. I think
they just considered me a minor nuisance.

Then, as Clive Feather pointed out, the database attempts to capture
what people actually do, rather than what their government tells
them to do.

In my opinion the informal nature of the tz database is a strength,
not a weakness.

-- 
		Peter Ilieve		peter at aldie.co.uk