[tz] Today's CalConnect event

[Paul Eggert]

On 2/5/19 8:55 AM, Paul.Koning at dell.com wrote:
> One wonders why ISO is doing this when an existing body does the work already, and has done so effectively for decades.  I wonder if the claim is based on reality; has anyone heard of this supposed effort before?  If yes, who is doing it and are they communicating with the TZ body?

I hadn't heard of the ISO time zone registry effort until today's email 
from Arthur. (Unfortunately I did not have the time to listen in on the 
CalConnect meeting myself.) As the ISO hasn't published anything and 
hasn't contacted us, I imagine that not much work has been done there yet.

This reminds me of a similar effort years ago under the aegis of the 
IETF. In 2005, Doug Royer drafted a Time Zone Registry spec 
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-royer-timezone-registry-03> that 
would have registered time zone names with IANA (not meanings; just 
names). Royer contacted the tz list about this and there was some 
discussion here in February 2005; the proposal expired in 2006.

In practice people nowadays seem to prefer using tzdb names directly to 
using a separate registry; see, for example, "Calendaring Extensions to 
WebDAV (CalDAV): Time Zones by Reference", Internet RFC 7809 (2016). The 
main exceptions I know of are HP-UX and Microsoft Windows, which both 
have their own registries that predate the popular usage of tzdb (though 
Microsoft Windows now also supports tzdb to some extent).

> It's not clear why ISO would be any more successful at cajoling country governments into early notice than the existing structure.

Yes, it's unlikely that (for example) the government of São Tomé and 
Príncipe would notify the ISO more reliably than they notify us.