New Mail List - timezones.external at software.com

David Keegel djk at cyber.com.au
Fri Feb 4 23:13:09 UTC 2000


] At 18:31 -0800 2000-02-03, Paul Eggert wrote:
] >   From: Doug Royer [SMTP:doug at home.royer.com]
] >   Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 6:47 PM
] [snip]
] >   IANA as part of the IETF is looking into administrating the names
] >   of world wide time zones.
] 
] What are IANA and the IETF?

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, http://www.iana.org/.
Its responsibilities are being transitioned to ICANN by Sept 2000.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' web site is
http://www.icann.org/.  Probably the most relevant part for time zone
names administration would be the ICANN Protocol Supporting Organization
http://www.icann.org/pso/pso.htm.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is at http://www.ietf.org/.
My understanding is that the IETF is more interested in developing
standards and architechtures for Internet Protocols and such, rather
than maintenance of data (like time zone names and rules).

Last time I looked, IANA wasn't part of the IETF.

It might be worth investigating whether the ICANN PSO would be interested
in providing a sort of umbrella for this group.

I expect they would want to leave the detective work largely to us (ie:
get out of the way and let us do our job) but they might be interested
in giving an official rubber stamp to high level policies like the
naming convention for time zone names (using the most populated city
and all that).

That way if people come to us and say "but it should be Brazil/Brasilia
rather than America/Sao_Paulo" we can say "Sorry, that's ICANN policy.
If you feel really strongly about it, you can go and lobby ICANN PSO."
At which point, 99% of people won't take it any further.
__________________________________________________________________________
 David Keegel <djk at cyber.com.au>  URL: http://www.cyber.com.au/users/djk/
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management



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