Timezone Maintainer Retiring 198
linuxwrangler writes "It's used in Java. It's used in nearly every flavor of UNIX/Linux. In PostgreSQL, Oracle and other databases. Several RFCs refer to it. But where does the timezone database come from? I never gave it much thought but would have assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not. Since the inception of the database Arthur David Olson has maintained the database, coordinated the mailing list and volunteers and provided a release platform and now he is retiring. IANA is developing a transition strategy. Jon Udell has an interesting literary appreciation of the timezone database."
Other potential hosts/sponsors (Score:5, Informative)
I would expect US NIST Time & Frequency division [nist.gov] or US Naval Observatory Time department [navy.mil] would be more than willing and able to host the zoneinfo database. Otherwise the time-nuts [leapsecond.com] would likely step in and offer their support. A number of them being long time Unix folk, they wouldn't be total strangers to IANA or various national time authorities.
Re:bored legislators (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that complicated. They all translate into offsets in seconds. To the computer, I don't live in America/Los_Angeles on 3:47pm Thu March 3, 2011. The computer sees:
1299196020 (unix time in UTC)
- 28800 (my zone offset in seconds, using the tz database)
+ 0 (no DST in my zone right now)
= 1299167220 (local time)
So the really impressive work has just been in conceptualizing and organizing the database so that a program just needs to lookup two questions: which of the zones am I in, and what is the current offset for that zone?
Re:Definition of awesome (Score:4, Informative)
this is 100% bullshit.
osanna died of a heart attack, and it was rewritten so it would be in c
rather than pdp assembly.
http://www.netadmintools.com/html/7roff.man.html
True, GP is b*shit... (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent up, since I'm losing that ability to post a better history.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=roff&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html#HISTORY [freebsd.org]
Osanna first [roff] version was written in the PDP-11 assembly language and released in 1973. Brian Kernighan joined the roff development by rewriting it in the C programming language. The C version was released in 1975.
[...]
After Osanna had died in 1977 by a heart-attack at the age of about 50, Kernighan went on with developing troff. The next milestone was to equip troff with a general interface to support more devices, the intermediate output format and the postprocessor system. This com- pleted the structure of a roff system as it is still in use today [...]