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."
Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not just eliminate timezones and switch over to GMT/UTC time? Does 12:00 absolutely have to be when the sun is at it's peak?
Re:bored legislators (Score:5, Interesting)
Governments of the world have too much time on their hands if they average fiddling with local time zones 20 times per year.
You are certainly right about the most recent update, "Mercer County, North Dakota, changed from the mountain time zone to the central time zone." But the changes are not always recent changes. Recent ChangeLog from Fedora 14 Updates:
Jon Postel (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe something similar happened when Jon Postel signed off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel [wikipedia.org]). For a while, he *was* the IANA.
You know your technology has stopped being a frontier when pioneers like these get replaced by commitees. Globally, it's not necessarily a bad thing, just a sign of times.
You know it's an old Sun workstation... (Score:5, Interesting)
under his desk, with a note taped to it that says "DO NOT TURN OFF".
That time in 1994 when some clod spilled coke on his desk almost brought it down, but TZ Guy was able to dive under his desk with his shirt off to soak up the spill before it started screwing things up...
Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a look at the source for this thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember looking at the source for this package when I was in New York City to run the marathon. It was held the morning the clocks went back to standard time, and I was wondering if my computer was up to date. I looked at the source of the timezone data package and it was filled with all sorts of gems. For instance
# From Paul Eggert (2001-03-06):
# Daylight Saving Time was first suggested as a joke by Benjamin Franklin
# in his whimsical essay ``An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost
# of Light'' published in the Journal de Paris (1784-04-26).
# Not everyone is happy with the results:
The comments are very instructive and the rules are all in plain text so I could easily discern that, yes, my system was up to date so that it would switch back to standard time on the first Sunday in November. (I gave up though when I realized that I wasn't sure what my cron daemon would do!)
On Debian just do apt-get source tzdata.
Oh, another good place to look for the oddities that are buried in your Unix system is to go to "info date" and follow the "Date input formats" node.
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had
some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to
make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done
better than handing down our present system.
Great easter eggs in Unix.
Re:Definition of awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
One wonders how many other situations like this exist, where critical system tools are basically handled by one person, or a tiny group.
When Unix was on its way to becoming a document processing system the programmer who wrote the formatter was killed in an auto accident. The team that took up the task of completing the program found his code so impenetrable that they abandoned it and started over. The original formatter was named roff, short for run off. The replacement was named nroff, new run off. IIRC this made Unix late for its premier as a document processing system. Eventually this was rewritten to be open-source, and named groff, which is still used to format man pages. Definitely deserving the title of useful software, but is there anyone out there who really understands how it works? All those traps and triggers?