New Mail List - timezones.external at software.com

[Paul Eggert]

   From: Doug Royer [SMTP:doug at home.royer.com]
   Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 6:47 PM

   The timezones.external at software.com list is for public discussion
   of timezone information.

How does that mailing list's charter differ from that of
tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov, which is a list for public discussion of time
zone information that has been in use since 1986?

I visited www.software.com, but found no discussion of the new list.
How does one join, or view its message archive?

   IANA as part of the IETF is looking into administrating the names
   of world wide time zones.

How and why will this administration differ from the process already
in place for the existing time zone database?

	   1) Port the government database and 'zic' (Zone Information
	      Compiler) to other OS's and have it also provide the
	      data in VTIMEZONE format. Most UNIX's use the government
	      database format and the zic compiler (man zic).

On 1998-07-16 Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca at renault.fr> wrote that he was
implementing (1); you might ask him how far he got.

	   2) Convert the government database into VTIMEZONE records for IANA
	      to administer.

Isn't conversion automatic?  If so, why would two databases need to be
administered separately?  One database should be generated
automatically from the other.

   And if someone want to volunteer - make a converter to go from
   VTIMEZONE format to zic input format to keep the databases in sync.

Why would this be necessary, if conversion is automatic?

FYI, here is a brief summary of existing sources for time zone data:
http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm

And here is a copy of the tz mailing list archive:
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz