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2014f and Russia
by Deborah Goldsmith Aug. 6, 2014

Aug. 6, 2014

Given the long lead time for deployment of TZ data in some cases, may I suggest that we expedite the release of the changes for Russia in 2014f, and defer any contentious changes to a subsequent release? Thank you, Deborah

4 7

[tz-announce] 2014f release of tz code and data available
by Paul Eggert Aug. 6, 2014

Aug. 6, 2014

The 2014f release of the tz code and data is available. It reflects the following changes, which were either circulated on the tz mailing list or are relatively minor technical or administrative changes: Changes affecting future time stamps Russia will subtract an hour from most of its time zones on 2014-10-26 at 02:00 local time. (Thanks to Alexander Krivenyshev.) There are a few exceptions: Magadan Oblast (Asia/Magadan) and Zabaykalsky Krai are subtracting two hours; conversely, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug (Asia/Anadyr), Kamchatka Krai (Asia/Kamchatka), Kemerovo Oblast (Asia/Novokuznetsk), and the Samara Oblast and the Udmurt Republic (Europe/Samara) are not changing their clocks. The changed zones are Europe/Kaliningrad, Europe/Moscow, Europe/Simferopol, Europe/Volgograd, Asia/Yekaterinburg, Asia/Omsk, Asia/Novosibirsk, Asia/Krasnoyarsk, Asia/Irkutsk, Asia/Yakutsk, Asia/Vladivostok, Asia/Khandyga, Asia/Sakhalin, and Asia/Ust-Nera; Asia/Magadan will have two hours subtracted; and Asia/Novokuznetsk's time zone abbreviation is affected, but not its UTC offset. Two zones are added: Asia/Chita (split from Asia/Yakutsk, and also with two hours subtracted) and Asia/Srednekolymsk (split from Asia/Magadan, but with only one hour subtracted). (Thanks to Tim Parenti for much of the above.) Changes affecting time zone abbreviations Australian eastern time zone abbreviations are now AEST/AEDT not EST, and similarly for the other Australian zones. That is, for eastern standard and daylight saving time the abbreviations are AEST and AEDT instead of the former EST for both; similarly, ACST/ACDT, ACWST/ACWDT, and AWST/AWDT are now used instead of the former CST, CWST, and WST. This change does not affect UTC offsets, only time zone abbreviations. (Thanks to Rich Tibbett and many others.) Asia/Novokuznetsk shifts from NOVT to KRAT (remaining on UTC+7) effective 2014-10-26 at 02:00 local time. The time zone abbreviation for Xinjiang Time (observed in Ürümqi) has been changed from URUT to XJT. (Thanks to Luther Ma.) Prefer MSK/MSD for Moscow time in Russia, even in other cities. Similarly, prefer EET/EEST for eastern European time in Russia. Change time zone abbreviations in (western) Samoa to use "ST" and "DT" suffixes, as this is more likely to match common practice. Prefix "W" to (western) Samoa time when its standard-time offset disagrees with that of American Samoa. America/Metlakatla now uses PST, not MeST, to abbreviate its time zone. Time zone abbreviations have been updated for Japan's two time zones used 1896-1937. JWST now stands for Western Standard Time, and JCST for Central Standard Time (formerly this was CJT). These abbreviations are now used for time in Korea, Taiwan, and Sakhalin while controlled by Japan. Changes affecting past time stamps China's five zones have been simplified to two, since the post-1970 differences in the other three seem to have been imaginary. The zones Asia/Harbin, Asia/Chongqing, and Asia/Kashgar have been removed; backwards-compatibility links still work, albeit with different behaviors for time stamps before May 1980. Asia/Urumqi's 1980 transition to UTC+8 has been removed, so that it is now at UTC+6 and not UTC+8. (Thanks to Luther Ma and to Alois Treindl; Treindl sent helpful translations of two papers by Guo Qingsheng.) Some zones have been turned into links, when they differed from existing zones only for older UTC offsets where the data were likely invented. These changes affect UTC offsets in pre-1970 time stamps only. This is similar to the change in release 2013e, except this time for western Africa. The affected zones are: Africa/Bamako, Africa/Banjul, Africa/Conakry, Africa/Dakar, Africa/Freetown, Africa/Lome, Africa/Nouakchott, Africa/Ouagadougou, Africa/Sao_Tome, and Atlantic/St_Helena. This also affects the backwards-compatibility link Africa/Timbuktu. (Thanks to Alan Barrett, Stephen Colebourne, Tim Parenti, and David Patte for reporting problems in earlier versions of this change.) Asia/Shanghai's pre-standard-time UT offset has been changed from 8:05:57 to 8:05:43, the location of Xujiahui Observatory. Its transition to standard time has been changed from 1928 to 1901. Asia/Taipei switched to JWST on 1896-01-01, then to JST on 1937-10-01, then to CST on 1945-09-21 at 01:00, and did not observe DST in 1945. In 1946 it observed DST from 05-15 through 09-30; in 1947 from 04-15 through 10-31; and in 1979 from 07-01 through 09-30. (Thanks to Yu-Cheng Chuang.) Asia/Riyadh's transition to standard time is now 1947-03-14, not 1950. Europe/Helsinki's 1942 fall-back transition was 10-04 at 01:00, not 10-03 at 00:00. (Thanks to Konstantin Hyppönen.) Pacific/Pago_Pago has been changed from UTC-11:30 to UTC-11 for the period from 1911 to 1950. Pacific/Chatham has been changed to New Zealand standard time plus 45 minutes for the period before 1957, reflecting a 1956 remark in the New Zealand parliament. Europe/Budapest has several pre-1946 corrections: in 1918 the transition out of DST was on 09-16, not 09-29; in 1919 it was on 11-24, not 09-15; in 1945 it was on 11-01, not 11-03; in 1941 the transition to DST was 04-08 not 04-06 at 02:00; and there was no DST in 1920. Africa/Accra is now assumed to have observed DST from 1920 through 1935. Time in Russia before 1927 or so has been corrected by a few seconds in the following zones: Europe/Moscow, Asia/Irkutsk, Asia/Tbilisi, Asia/Tashkent, Asia/Vladivostok, Asia/Yekaterinburg, Europe/Helsinki, and Europe/Riga. Also, Moscow's location has been changed to its Kilometer 0 point. (Thanks to Vladimir Karpinsky for the Moscow changes.) Changes affecting data format A new file 'zone1970.tab' supersedes 'zone.tab' in the installed data. The new file's extended format allows multiple country codes per zone. The older file is still installed but is deprecated; its format is not changing and it will still be distributed for a while, but new applications should use the new file. The new file format simplifies maintenance of obscure locations. To test this, it adds coverage for the Crozet Islands and the Scattered Islands. (Thanks to Tobias Conradi and Antoine Leca.) The file 'iso3166.tab' is planned to switch from ASCII to UTF-8. It is still ASCII now, but commentary about the switch has been added. The new file 'zone1970.tab' already uses UTF-8. Changes affecting code 'localtime', 'mktime', etc. now use much less stack space if ALL_STATE is defined. (Thanks to Elliott Hughes for reporting the problem.) 'zic' no longer mishandles input when ignoring case in locales that are not compatible with English, e.g., unibyte Turkish locales when compiled with HAVE_GETTEXT. Error diagnostics of 'zic' and 'yearistype' have been reworded so that they no longer use ASCII '-' as if it were a dash. 'zic' now rejects output file names that contain '.' or '..' components. (Thanks to Tim Parenti for reporting the problem.) 'zic -v' now warns about output file names that do not follow POSIX rules, or that contain a digit or '.'. (Thanks to Arthur David Olson for starting the ball rolling on this.) Some lint has been removed when using GCC_DEBUG_FLAGS with GCC 4.9.0. Changes affecting build procedure 'zic' no longer links in localtime.o and asctime.o, as they're not needed. (Thanks to John Cochran.) Changes affecting documentation and commentary The 'Theory' file documents legacy names, the longstanding exceptions to the POSIX-inspired file name rules. The 'zic' documentation clarifies the role of time types when interpreting dates. (Thanks to Arthur David Olson.) Documentation and commentary now prefer UTF-8 to US-ASCII, allowing the use of proper accents in foreign words and names. Code and data have not changed because of this. (Thanks to Garrett Wollman, Ian Abbott, and Guy Harris for helping to debug this.) Non-HTML documentation and commentary now use plain-text URLs instead of HTML insertions, and are more consistent about bracketing URLs when they are not already surrounded by white space. (Thanks to suggestions by Steffen Nurpmeso.) There is new commentary about Xujiahui Observatory, the five timezone project in China from 1918 to 1949, timekeeping in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and Tibet Time in the 1950s. The sharp-eyed can spot the warlord Jin Shuren in the data. Commentary about the coverage of each Russian zone has been standardized. (Thanks to Tim Parenti). There is new commentary about contemporary timekeeping in Ethiopia. Obsolete comments about a 2007 proposal for DST in Kuwait has been removed. There is new commentary about time in Poland in 1919. Proper credit has been given to DST inventor George Vernon Hudson. Commentary about time in Metlakatla, AK and Resolute, NU has been improved, with a new source for the former. In zone.tab, Pacific/Easter no longer mentions Salas y Gómez, as it is uninhabited. Commentary about permanent Antarctic bases has been updated. Several typos have been corrected. (Thanks to Tim Parenti for contributing some of these fixes.) tz-link.htm now mentions the JavaScript libraries Moment Timezone, TimezoneJS.Date, Walltime-js, and Timezone. (Thanks to a heads-up from Matt Johnson.) Also, it mentions the Go 'latlong' package. (Thanks to a heads-up from Dirkjan Ochtman.) The files usno1988, usno1989, usno1989a, usno1995, usno1997, and usno1998 have been removed. These obsolescent US Naval Observatory entries were no longer helpful for maintenance. (Thanks to Tim Parenti for the suggestion.) Here are links to the release files: ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/releases/tzcode2014f.tar.gz ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/releases/tzdata2014f.tar.gz The files are also available via HTTP as follows: http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/releases/tzcode2014f.tar.gz http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/releases/tzdata2014f.tar.gz Each release file has a GPG signature, which can be retrieved by appending ".asc" to the above URLs. Copies of these signatures are appended to this message. As usual, links to the latest release files are here: http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tzcode-latest.tar.gz http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tzdata-latest.tar.gz ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzcode-latest.tar.gz ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzdata-latest.tar.gz This release corresponds to commit 17be956450ed23b20e7c9997e96350dba5b866ce dated Tue Aug 5 17:42:36 2014 -0700 and tagged '2014f' in the unofficial github repository at <https://github.com/eggert/tz>. Here are the GPG checksums for the release files: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAABAgAGBQJT4XtOAAoJEO2X6Q5iqn400hwP+wZsP6vMtAn4tabWFOg5mlCF zpf8Xfte/ytIkHTjQYa0QFLlV7+4z9A0R2eHy2H/+fHXXw4sNite1ACJFQ6ppT9M ZqUWzPbF+f6Xzft2gqmPdTz+glTRRQequTewbGHXh3LvGHVFHfhhvRXqjn+tJ/he nOchcOusZPQiNJBzhlXd/bHHYgYjwcYnDnaWEESbY/cY3AIySP8TOA7ljzcznzLR 4HlO8ZnXo535pbHw7PfQTtZ6TNM0Kbr4OkS/eE5XnDBgkVPr2Gj7d/2knkcJgkO4 xHjQb1sO7obN6mOJGgbTur939oXw3Cle7oQzpeF5Dy6dwBMmBPJTa9b7AJTQ6OyO Kqx5bAw1sXN1nW1NFtlfnlGNl5NDcSrRvZG4ZhAmoju1ksi2C9D5aamyBYkEajhd d0oISeGNBjn3CkB/2ad5oh486iWMbxDcsXlPuGYUzkHan8qtlfHzSLd4AbNHrFDw 8Knw7QE0Hkmxz/fd85DEe4d23ds81dzkik3VTYh4d2TgNPwlcJyP/H6dwpsVjLui jn9i5AtdF8FAo4CsUKtyr7WDopiU6qlgRZvtcziDXUsO7KqPYtrXOI2Ly9zg5DCq hVmCRQgYCn94D2QswGSYdtfzsvUTszi3DPI2X2XqZB2Uu9zIQvq8LCFhgWC4PbkL 5ftWOb1UFwvmexq+3Z+8 =FlHy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAABAgAGBQJT4XtOAAoJEO2X6Q5iqn40+k8P/ijgRGw/ucOh9NYbzCFDbN68 tvA/B4KDjNzxWnUGJft2flofSJLiPgKGmMWyShIya72iksB5jUj76IeWqfFGZbin nwepX/RHFIKqMP8IqPa1DU2sEKC9per9wapdjSpwFk2/WMgiKk9lFNd9dxKV7Tuz M3Vn1tXjMjELbFNee//GXN26hEqFQ2z8uTn+gVq1aeDLFwr0EGs3615UNU0l0Nna Vm1w6tQzj2pVFgIIoH1HOEWcRlfbwQ+b7EjsQG8YBlUMYD+GPaISM7FLQ1R+3+VS nX4V0z60u+VHNNH6YIgBSFzJv4eJlovIn6GkjK2JuoPYMF5aVRqUEk75IWSLE2xl QeDYJIoO3gZkdyKvZLWPu8D4F3mieNaHX6BZawUJnh70dyM/w6SO5DAZpz/xR5RU km0bcMkK4bqs1W+EToSYB8hhFXDPfKtyNb7PEPBEUcOIgPGuxgyLTBhMIMgeNVZL zd1XWCvTpdLsYWUiRMqNirOj2tFy8Tu1vTzzinMe1BFqDKzWlNawvLQ1Oq8KmSJm B+yl1t6AXPH9HhrrR1yot/vmsnMPbnKYVt8Fk9MaSQ9mxuH9KtR/+0IjE9Z+i2zl Axn9+C/5SuJ2/TY1SJkdDibasiFI0HUUMWQui7PtOu/JVM9Lqf3jcdpEUmtrWRQU +PXmO3UhoBnhm9J5Y9a3 =QvEh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ tz-announce mailing list tz-announce(a)iana.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/tz-announce

1 0

2011-09-17 reported Siberia bug
by Tobias Conradi Aug. 5, 2014

Aug. 5, 2014

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/4872/match=siberia Still open. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com

2 3

Large scale changes proposed in 2014f
by Stephen Colebourne Aug. 5, 2014

Aug. 5, 2014

I believe that the changes currently proposed are far far too widespread and damaging. I have taken the latest in the GitHub repo and expanded them out into actual resolved results. The differences between 2014e and 2014f-proposed can be seen here: https://github.com/jodastephen/tzdiff/commit/c812da9e12bd6f8aa52fa2dd758e23… (other version differences available here: https://github.com/jodastephen/tzdiff/commits/proposed-2014f) As can be seen from the first link, the changes proposed are very widespread. they include - Africa/Accra gains DST between 1920 and 1935 - Africa/Freetown loses its entire history of DST - Africa/Kampala has very different DST history - Africa/Dar_es_Salaam has entirely different history before 1961 - Africa/Djibouti gains history before 1960 - Africa/Addis_Ababa has completely different history before 1960 - Africa/Asmara has completely different history before 1960 - Africa/Conakry loses history before 1960 - Africa/Banjul loses history before 1964 - Africa/Maseru gains DST history - Africa/Mbabane gains DST history - Africa/Mogadishu gains completely different DST history and many others with more minor changes. I'd also note that Ho_Chi_Minh, Kashgar, Saigon, Vientiane and Phnom_Penh lose their entire history The changes to Asia/Qatar and Asia/Kuwait look suspect. Asia/Urumqi loses its entire history. Indian/Antananarivo, Comoro and Mayotte get entirely different DST history. Pacific/Midway, Pago_Pago, Saipan, Samoa get entirely different DST history. The above is an attempt to summarise some but not all of the changes. I am far from convinced that the scale of the proposed changes (far bigger than even 2013e) have been anywhere near justified. Is there consensus on the list that all of these changes are better than what went before? Stephen On 16 July 2014 06:40, Paul Eggert <eggert(a)cs.ucla.edu> wrote: > Paul Eggert wrote: >> >> Alan Barrett wrote: >>> >>> To the best of my knowledge, most other African countries that share the >>> same UTC offset do not use the abbreviation "SAST" >> >> >> Thanks for catching this; this was indeed an error in the merge, and >> I'll prepare a patch shortly that reverts to the previous behavior here >> as well. > > > By "most other African countries" I expect you meant the same set of > countries that use "CAT" rather than "SAST" in Release 2014e. > > Anyway, the revised patch turned into more research than I expected, but I > finally came up with the attached proposal. This patch fixes the problem > you noted, along with the other specific problems noted, though it does > still turn some zones into links when there's no good evidence for the > zones' differences. > > I hope I correctly puzzled out Google Translate's mangling of Hungarian for > the fixes to Hungarian daylight saving time rules in 1918-1945. Oross's work > has facsimiles of the original material! If only our other sources were as > meticulous....

13 27

Corroborating material
by Lester Caine Aug. 4, 2014

Aug. 4, 2014

I'm going to try and get a bit of time in on http://timedb.co.uk/ and I'd appreciate any material people have relating to historic timezone data ... -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk

1 0

Fwd: Proposal to rename zone.tab to region.tab
by Tobias Conradi July 31, 2014

July 31, 2014

Retry, this didn't go through 2013-09-15, due to blocking by the time zone mailing list maintainer. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tobias Conradi <mail.2012(a)tobiasconradi.com> Date: Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 12:29 PM Subject: Proposal to rename zone.tab to region.tab To: "tz(a)iana.org mailing list" <tz(a)iana.org> Proposal to rename ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/zone.tab to ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/region.tab Reason: ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory says ----- Scope of the tz database ----- ... To represent this data, the world is partitioned into regions .... For each such region, the database records all known clock transitions, and labels the region ...... Uniquely identify every national region .... Indicate to humans as to where that region is. .... is the name of a specific location within that region. ..... Uninhabited regions like ..... If all the clocks in a region have agreed since 1970, .... even if subregions' clocks disagreed before 1970. ...... Use cities or small islands, not countries or regions, [! other meaning] ..... The file `zone.tab' lists the geographical locations used to name time zone rule files. It is intended to be an exhaustive list of names for geographic regions as described above. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com

4 6

Proposal: Use Git and Github better
by Matt Johnson July 31, 2014

July 31, 2014

I think it's great that we're using Git and Github as the experimental / unofficial repository at https://github.com/eggert/tz. It's much easier to track change history looking through the commit log and see the changes than by reading through emails with patch attachments. However, we're not currently taking advantage of all that this environment has to offer. -- Item 1 -- We should be making better use of branches. We currently have a single "master" branch that everything gets committed to. This is problematic, because it doesn't separate things that are certain to be released from things that are proposed changes. For example, the recent time.tab file, and the other large-scale proposed changes that are currently being debated, could have been created on feature branches. This would have given the tz list members a place to look at the proposed changes and make additional suggestions (via pull requests) before things are finalized. As it sits today, since everything is in master, if the proposal is ultimately defeated then new commits will have to be made to master to revert these changes. The danger comes if, say we needed to issue an emergency release sometime in between. Since master isn't in a state of positive agreement, then one would have to branch from an earlier point in history to build a hotfix release, then merge that hotfix back to master later. It's much easier if we can just trust that master always consists of things that are certain to be released. See also: https://www.atlassian.com/git/workflows#!workflow-feature-branch http://www.git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching-and-Merging -- Item 2 -- I think that we should all make better use of forking and pull-requests for submitting proposed changes. Instead of submitting a patch file to the mailing list, one should fork the GitHub repo, make their changes, then create a pull request. This allows for place for discussion on proposals where the code can be referenced much easier. It also ensures that the author of each and every change is tracked in the commit log. And finally, it makes it much clearer which proposals were adopted and which were not. Presently, looking through the mailing list archives, it's quite difficult to tell if any given patch was actually applied or not. -- Item 3 -- We should decide how the GitHub issue tracker fits in to the ecosystem. I see that there have been a few issues reported to via the issue tracker in the past, but most things have come through the mailing list. If we adopt the conventions used by other modern projects, then we should be reporting bugs through the issue tracker so their history can be more easily found. Another benefit is that you can reference issue numbers in commits, and you can reference commits in the comments of an issue. This linking makes it quite easy to find the code or data that was changed in response to an issue. The mailing list should probably be used for extended discussion, rather than as a place to report issues. Though, there may be some blend of both, I personally think that an issue tracker is much more palatable than a mailing list for many of these kinds of things. There should probably be some guidance document on the iana tz page about what goes where. -- Item 4 -- While Paul Eggert is the tz maintainer, and I appreciate his efforts greatly, I personally don't feel that it's appropriate for the github repo to be in his personal "eggert" account. There should instead be a common "organizational account" for the project, such as github.com/tzdb or similar. ("iana" is taken, but appears to be unused or abandonded. Someone may want to inquire about obtaining it, as "github.com/iana/tz" would be quite appropriate IMHO). Though Paul would be the administrator of this account, his own personal account would no longer be authoritative. That also ties back to the idea of pull-requests. Since Paul makes the majority of changes, he would first make them in his own account, and then send a pull-request to the main account. Then a link could be sent to the mailing list for discussion on the pull request before it was merged in. As a side note - I've found that several third-party projects are linking to the unofficial sources using git submodules. While this isn't officially sanctioned, it would be much better if they could link to iana/tz instead of eggert/tz. -- Item 5 -- While code and data often go hand-in-hand, there are quite a lot of projects these days that only rely on the tz data. There are also a lot of releases of code changes that don't require data changes. Having both code and data in a single project seems rather inefficient. I propose that they be split back to separate projects, and maintained in separate github repos (tzdata / tzcode). Also, consider also that perhaps there are too many merged projects just within the code. For example, tzselect, zic, zdump, etc. might be broken out for better visibility of changes and for clarity of dependent files. I look forward to feedback on these items. I'm sure not all will be in agreement, but I think it's important that we look forward to new and better ways to manage this project - rather than just sticking with the ways of the past. -Matt

7 6

Canada/East-Saskatchewan
by Eric Muller July 31, 2014

July 31, 2014

The file backward contains those two links: Link America/Regina Canada/East-Saskatchewan Link America/Regina Canada/Saskatchewan If I am not mistaken, Saskatchewan can be divided in four areas: - the area around Swift Current, using the rule America/Swift_Current - an area to the west, around Lloydminster, using the rule America/Edmonton - an area to the east, around Denare Beach and Creighton, using the rule America/Winnipeg - the rest of the province, using the rule America/Regina I wonder if Canada/East-Saskatchewan was meant for the area to the east, and should therefore be linked to America/Winnipeg instead? Thanks, Eric.

3 2

Some typo fixes
by Tim Parenti July 31, 2014

July 31, 2014

A few typo fixes attached, along with some fuller sources in tz-art.htm. -- Tim Parenti

2 1

Updating the Efele maps: which names?
by Eric Muller July 27, 2014

July 27, 2014

I am looking at updating the Efele maps (http://efele.net/maps/tz/) primarily to deal with the changes in Russia, and more generally make sure that the maps are in sync with the current/next release of TZ. TZ provides a bunch of zone names, either via a Zone entry or via a Link entry. I am taking this opportunity to make sure that all these names are accounted for, in one of three ways: - names that do not belong to the maps (e.g. Etc/UTC) - names that should have a corresponding area in the maps - names that are aliases for other names I elected to retain the current per-country separations, as I believe it is more appropriate for maps, and more generally to retain the finest granularity possible. Some users may want to merge areas that follow the sames rules, but may have different definition of same rules (e.g. some may want to fold what is not different since 1970, others may want to fold what is not different since last year; some may ignore the FORMAT, some may not), and the finest granularity accommodates the largest number of uses. Here is what I came up with. All the names of TZ are supposed to be present somewhere. Comments welcome. Thanks, Eric. These names will not appear in my maps: --- CET CST6CDT EET EST EST5EDT Etc/GMT Etc/GMT0 Etc/GMT-0 Etc/Greenwich GMT GMT+0 GMT0 GMT-0 Greenwich Etc/GMT+1 Etc/GMT+10 Etc/GMT+11 Etc/GMT+12 Etc/GMT+2 Etc/GMT+3 Etc/GMT+4 Etc/GMT+5 Etc/GMT+6 Etc/GMT+7 Etc/GMT+8 Etc/GMT+9 Etc/GMT-1 Etc/GMT-10 Etc/GMT-11 Etc/GMT-12 Etc/GMT-13 Etc/GMT-14 Etc/GMT-2 Etc/GMT-3 Etc/GMT-4 Etc/GMT-5 Etc/GMT-6 Etc/GMT-7 Etc/GMT-8 Etc/GMT-9 Etc/UCT UCT Etc/UTC Etc/Universal Etc/Zulu Universal UTC Zulu HST MET MST MST7MDT PST8PDT WET ---- Each line below will be a separate area, labelled with the first name in the line. The other names are considered aliases. As before, there will also be areas labeled "uninhabited" or "unknown", and Antarctica will be points rather than areas. ---- Africa/Abidjan Africa/Accra Africa/Addis_Ababa Africa/Algiers Africa/Asmara Africa/Asmera Africa/Bamako Africa/Timbuktu Africa/Bangui Africa/Banjul Africa/Bissau Africa/Blantyre Africa/Brazzaville Africa/Bujumbura Africa/Cairo Egypt Africa/Casablanca Africa/Ceuta Africa/Conakry Africa/Dakar Africa/Dar_es_Salaam Africa/Djibouti Africa/Douala Africa/El_Aaiun Africa/Freetown Africa/Gaborone Africa/Harare Africa/Johannesburg Africa/Juba Africa/Kampala Africa/Khartoum Africa/Kigali Africa/Kinshasa Africa/Lagos Africa/Libreville Africa/Lome Africa/Luanda Africa/Lubumbashi Africa/Lusaka Africa/Malabo Africa/Maputo Africa/Maseru Africa/Mbabane Africa/Mogadishu Africa/Monrovia Africa/Nairobi Africa/Ndjamena Africa/Niamey Africa/Nouakchott Africa/Ouagadougou Africa/Porto-Novo Africa/Sao_Tome Africa/Tripoli Libya Africa/Tunis Africa/Windhoek America/Adak US/Aleutian America/Atka America/Anchorage US/Alaska America/Anguilla America/Antigua America/Araguaina America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires America/Buenos_Aires America/Argentina/Catamarca America/Catamarca America/Argentina/ComodRivadavia America/Argentina/Cordoba America/Cordoba America/Rosario America/Argentina/Jujuy America/Jujuy America/Argentina/La_Rioja America/Argentina/Mendoza America/Mendoza America/Argentina/Rio_Gallegos America/Argentina/Salta America/Argentina/San_Juan America/Argentina/San_Luis America/Argentina/Tucuman America/Argentina/Ushuaia America/Aruba America/Asuncion America/Atikokan America/Bahia America/Bahia_Banderas America/Barbados America/Belem America/Belize America/Blanc-Sablon America/Boa_Vista America/Bogota America/Boise America/Cambridge_Bay America/Campo_Grande America/Cancun America/Caracas America/Cayenne America/Cayman America/Chicago US/Central America/Chihuahua America/Coral_Harbour America/Costa_Rica America/Creston America/Cuiaba America/Curacao 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Pacific/Fiji Pacific/Funafuti Pacific/Galapagos Pacific/Gambier Pacific/Guadalcanal Pacific/Guam Pacific/Honolulu US/Hawaii Pacific/Johnston Pacific/Kiritimati Pacific/Kosrae Pacific/Kwajalein Kwajalein Pacific/Majuro Pacific/Marquesas Pacific/Midway Pacific/Nauru Pacific/Niue Pacific/Norfolk Pacific/Noumea Pacific/Pago_Pago US/Samoa Pacific/Palau Pacific/Pitcairn Pacific/Pohnpei Pacific/Ponape Pacific/Port_Moresby Pacific/Rarotonga Pacific/Saipan Pacific/Samoa Pacific/Tahiti Pacific/Tarawa Pacific/Tongatapu Pacific/Wake Pacific/Wallis Pacific/Yap ----

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