FW: IANA time zone registration - proposal

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) said:
> A couple of years ago there was talk on the CALSCH mailing list to have an
> IANA time zone registration process. I have submitted a proposal for that
> registry to the IETF.
> 
> A copy can be found at:
> 
>      http://inet-consulting.com/draft-royer-timezone-registry-00.txt

Some brief comments.

I'm not at all convinced that the iCalendar format is suitable. For
example, it assumes that time zones only have two types of entry -
"standard" and "daylight" (some zones also have "double summer time") -
even if it does allow them to occur more than once. Furthermore, it is
surely better to have the offset-change-moments specified in UTC than in
some local timezone.

The registry merely needs to contain the correct values. Fetching data from
the registry and converting to a specific format is a software issue. The
registry should either use the Olsen data directly, or it should use a
clean, standard, and extensible format like XML.

In section 5, <tzrev> should be specified as:
    tzrev = 8DIGIT "T" 6DIGIT "Z"
except that I don't think being case-insensitive is a good idea, since
ISO 8601 doesn't allow lowercase (IIRC). So it should be:
    tzrev = 8DIGIT %x54 6DIGIT %x5A
Then explain that the digits are YYYYHHDD hhmmss in a separate comment. Or,
if you prefer, write:

    tzrev = tzyear tzmon tzday %x54 tzhour tzmin tzsec %x5A
    tzyear = 4DIGIT
    tzmon  = "0" %x31-39 / "10" / "11" / "12"
    tzday  = ("0" / "1" / "2") DIGIT / "30" / "31"
    tzhour = ("0" / "1") DIGIT / "20" / "21" / "22" / "23"
    tzmin  = %x30-35 DIGIT
    tzsec  = %x30-35 DIGIT / "60"

In section 6, shouldn't "rzrev" be "tzrev"?

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