Java's set of timezone names (was: Re: Timestamp Conversion Woes Redux)

On Wednesday 20 July 2005 13:41, Tom Lane wrote:
> Hmm ... does Java have a standard set of timezone names? If so,
> does it bear any resemblance to the zic database names?

I'm not sure how Roedy Green knows this, but this is what he has to
say on the subject in his Java Glossary:

http://www.mindprod.com/jgloss/timezone.html

The names for timezones used in Java comes from a list maintained
at NIH by Arthur David Olson. For reasons only he understands,
Pacific Standard Time is called America/Los_Angeles.

As far as I can tell, Olson's timezone data can be found here:
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/

Sun's JDK puts timezone data in $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/zi/

Sun's JDK's timezone info seems fairly different from what, say,
Fedora Core distributes in its tzdata RPM:

| $ find /usr/share/zoneinfo/ -type f -printf '%P\n' | sort > /tmp/linux-tzdata.txt
| $ find /usr/local/j2sdk1.4.2_08/jre/lib/zi -type f -printf '%P\n' | sort > /tmp/java-tzdata.txt
| $ diff /tmp/linux-tzdata.txt /tmp/java-tzdata.txt | wc -l
| 1309