[R-SIG-Finance] Data (Was: TZs)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 19 October 2011 at 11:44, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
| 2011/10/19 Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>:
| >
| > On 19 October 2011 at 13:00, Daniel Cegiełka wrote:
| > | ICANN takes control of Internet Internet Time Zone Database
| > |
| > | http://www.icann.org/en/news/releases/release-14oct11-en.pdf
| > |
| > | The problem with TZ probably can be considered as solved :)
| >
| > Not so fast. While this is undoubtedly excellent news which presumably solves
| > the _database_ issue after the tireless work of Olson and Eggert came under
| > patent troll attack, it does not magically give us the pony to fix all broken
| > Windows installations.
| >
| > Remember that the whole reason R ships with TZ data (and the Olson library)
| > is that a certain popular operating system fails to provide this natively.
| >
| > But I nitpick. We all have an option or two when it comes to OSs and many of
| > us even exercise these ;)
| >
| 
| I am not sure specifically what you are referring to here but Windows
| does support time zones.  Here is a list of the ones supported by

I was paraphrasing Brian Ripley who used the term 'woefully inadequate':

   From: Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>
   To: Jeff Ryan <jeff.a.ryan at gmail.com>
   Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
   Subject: Re: [Rd] tzone DB lawsuit Implications for R-project?
   Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2011 16:51:17 +0100 (BST)
   
   Not as yet.  Many much bigger users than us (almost all Unix-alike 
   OSes, Java, Tcl, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, ...) have more resources 
   to investigate.
   
   Note that we only use the database on Windows, and only because OS 
   services are woefully inadequate on that platform: we could go back to 
   using those services ....
   
Cheers, Dirk   

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