timezone date (was: Fwd: Manual Post Requested for draft-howard-rfc2307bis)

Howard,

do you think setting something like the timezone used for a user would be
feasible? Or other Unix locale data? I raised this on [email protected] a couple
of days ago and it could be related to your current work on that draft.

Ciao, Michael.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ldap] Re: LDAP attribute type for timezone, retrieve locale for
shell sessions
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:25:42 +0200
From: Michael Ströder <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
References: <[email protected]> <1250172072.6473.14.camel@linux-m3mt>

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 15:59 +0200, Michael Ströder wrote:
>> Anybody aware of an attribute type dedicated to store the time zone of a user?
>
> Nope (but timezone codes are just strings).  I think this would be the
> 'default' timezone of a user;

Hmm, frankly I'm not really familiar with this stuff. Looking at the timezone
package on my Linux my spontaneous idea would be to add directory entries
containing the compiled timezone blobs and a time zone attribute would just
contain a DN as reference on this timezone blob entry.

>  but a user can easily move between time
> zones.

Yes, I'm aware of that. So the timezone setting in the directory entry should
be kind of a self-service attribute.

>  It is actually pretty difficult [for scheduling applications] to
> determine what is the correct thing to do with TZ sometimes.

Well, calendaring software is not my primary goal. Rather simple things like
displaying timestamps in local time in my web2ldap or correctly set the
timezone-related env vars in a shell. The latter could be easily overridden by
local shell profiles.

>> It would also make sense if pam_ldap/nss_ldap could query the locale of the
>> user from the user's directory entry and set the locale accordingly. Anybody
>> doing something like this?
>
> Wow, that would be awesome.  But I'm not holding my breath.

;-)

Let's first discuss a data model...

Ciao, Michael.