Hi Juergen,
At 02:58 09-01-2014, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
People want to be able to configure timezones using the timezone
naming scheme commonly supported by operating systems (e.g.,
Europe/Paris). This document defines a serialization of the timezone
names into YANG format for this purpose. I believe there was indeed
strong concensus on this in the WG.
There was a message about a quick poll [1] to adopt
draft-lange-netmod-iana-timezones-01 on 2 July, 2012. Three persons
expressed their support and the WG Chair expressed his support as a
technical contributor [2]; there weren't any message objecting to
adoption. There were two comments [3][4] on 30 July, 2012. There
was a WG Last Call announcement [5] and two reminders [6][7] about
it. There was a message [8] on 12 November, 2013 from a WG
participant (I am not taking into account the message from the author
and one of the WG Chairs). My comment about the determination of
consensus being questionable is based on the messages in the NETMOD
mailing list archive.
This document aims at establishing an IANA maintained serialization of
whatever list of names the timezone database contains. It does not
change the way the TZ coordinator, an IANA Designated Expert, takes
decisions. Perhaps this needs to be stated more explicit.
There is a thread at
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-May/017711.html The problem is
not changing the way things are done. I would describe the current
TZ approach as keeping the TZ information up-to-date by posting a
(software) release every now and then. It works for me.
So far (in the MIB world), the initial versions of IANA maintained
modules were published as Proposed Standards on the standards track
(although the only thing that really remains valid over time are the
IANA considerations, which however often require the initial module to
be available). We simply followed this practice.
If I understood correctly the YANG module defined in the draft
creates IANA-registered timezones based on public domain [9]
information about timezones. IANA is then asked to keep the
IANA-registered timezones up-to-date. That sounds okay if the
politics about time are not taken into consideration [10][11][12].
There was concensus in the WG that it is desirable to configure
timezones by name (e.g., Europe/Paris) instead of having only hard
coded UTC offsets - the benefits should be obvious.
I agree that there can be benefits to that approach. I could not
find the (mailing list) message where that WG decision was taken.
Regards,
-sm
1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg06810.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg06841.html
3. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg06932.html
4. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg06933.html
5. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg08327.html
6. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg08333.html
7. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg08335.html
8. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/netmod/current/msg08694.html
9. ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/tz-link.html
10.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/sep/26/spain-countries-wrong-time-zone
11. http://972mag.com/the-worlds-only-ethnic-time-zone/81006/
12.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/22/just-wait-until-you-see-how-apples-new-operating-system-lists-jerusalem/