Re: [Tzdist] Next step

Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com> Mon, 19 October 2015 15:07 UTC

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Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:06:17 -0400
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From: Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com>
To: Ken Murchison <murch@andrew.cmu.edu>
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Subject: Re: [Tzdist] Next step
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On 19 October 2015 at 09:55, Cyrus Daboo <cyrus@daboo.name> wrote:

> 1) Add a location->tzid mapping extension to the tzdist protocol. That
> ought to be a relatively trivial extension to define if there is interest.
>

+1 to the idea.

On 19 October 2015 at 10:14, Ken Murchison <murch@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

> Actually, would this be a mapping from something like "Pittsburgh, PA" ->
> "America/New_York", or from GPS coordinates to a tzid, or both?


Although both would be quite useful, mappings from location strings such as
"Pittsburgh, PA" to geographical coordinates such as 40.44,-79.95 are well
outside the scope of things timezone-related, and that is arguably a space
which is fairly well-serviced by existing APIs.  So I think
coordinates-to-timezone should be sufficient for us, but perhaps we would
want to develop a protocol for other useful mappings.

To be clear, this kind of "mapping" data (if you'll pardon the play on
words) is something the tz (Olson) project has explicitly avoided over the
years, due to the highly political nature of border disputes and the like.
Hopefully it is evident to most on this list that the mapping from location
to timezone is unequivocally NOT one-to-one, despite the appearance in most
cases that it is, but I'll hold off on specific examples unless/until the
WG decides we should explore this path.

Even so, for implementors, Eric Muller's maps at http://efele.net/maps/tz/
are reasonably up-to-date (2013b) and may be a decent starting point for a
service seeking to provide this kind of data.

On 19 October 2015 at 09:55, Cyrus Daboo <cyrus@daboo.name> wrote:

> 2) In conjunction with the IANA tzdb folks, define a media type that
> describes the "zoneinfo" file format (either a direct binary representation
> or, say, a JSON representation of that) so that tzdist servers can directly
> provide the zoneinfo file data that many OS's use.
>

If this is an offshoot from Ticket 34
<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/tzdist/trac/ticket/34> ("should we include a
raw tzdb format media type?"), then +1 to this collaboration as well.

--
Tim Parenti