[tz-announce] 2014f release of tz code and data available

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:

[tz-announce] 2014f release of tz code and data available

Paul Eggert