[tz] On merging timezones - a radical proposal.

[Guy Harris]

On May 23, 2013, at 7:52 AM, Eliot Lear <lear at cisco.com> wrote:

> On 5/23/13 2:47 AM, John Hawkinson wrote:
> 
>> "That's nice," but we're not there yet.
> 
> Complain to your vendor.  RFC-4833 was meant to take a big bite out of
> this, but Apple has chosen to go with a geo-service,

Apple has to be prepared to go with geolocation anyway; if the DHCP servers don't offer time zone information, the clients either have to ask the user or figure out out themselves, and geolocation will handle the latter if you have zone boundaries.

Yes, OS X probably *should* ask for one or both of them in its DHCP client, and use it/them *if* they're offered, but if they don't get time zone information from the DHCP server, they need to fall back on geolocation.  Their own base stations run NetBSD (in the current versions; older ones ran some simpler embedded OS) so they could offer the base station TZ setting from its DHCP server (I don't know how the base station gets its TZ setting - the old 5.x AirPort Utility let you set it, as I remember, but the Shiny New 6.x AirPort Utility doesn't; my guess is it's doing geolocation with Skyhook or something such as that).

> and Microsoft has not yet acted, so far as I know.

I think they could turn POSIX TZ strings into rules for Windows, but they might have to pick up the Olson database in order to handle tz database TZ strings.