May 2013 - tz - lists.iana.org

Re: [tz] tz Digest, Vol 20, Issue 28
by Shawn Steele May 21, 2013

May 21, 2013

> Say that Floofy (fl) and Fnord (fn) claim ownership of the large city of Fubar. I don't see anything > wrong with putting Fubar in fl and fn. This way people in Floofy and Fnord see the city they expect > to be there. And at the end of the day that's what tzinfo is for. Logically, that makes sense, however geopolitically, people will figure out a way to object. The Fnordians would complain that Fubar doesn't belong in Floofy because it's part of Fnord. How would you or I feel if New York showed up in Canada? At the very least you'd report the bug. If the vendor pushed back on the bug, we'd probably push back with "what, are you crazy? NY is clearly in the US, not Canada." Geopolitics isn't about logic. That said, it might be possible in some cases to attach a city to two region codes. Or to create two cities for the same place. > My goal is to reduce the political debate on this list, and leave it to the diplomats and the standards committees > that are under their control, to determine what is a country, and what city is in a country - > then reflect those decisions in the database. That works a bit. However it breaks down when someone wants to ship software that depends on the data. Then their customers push the same problems. And, note, that the IANA Timezone Database *IS* the standard, and we *ARE* the standard committee. It should be perfectly acceptable to point to ISO for the ISO standards though. The timezone data shouldn't pick & choose from other standards, if someone expresses a concern with another standard that the tzdb depends on, they should be pointed to the other standard to address it there. Worse, if someone objects to another standard's behavior, they could attempt to use the timezone effort to pressure the other standard, assuming they can get the timezone effort to see their viewpoint. IMO we should leave external standards alone, and focus on the timezone parts. A rather obvious alternate mapping would be to map to zones rather than cities, however that'd undoubtedly have it's own geopolitical problems. - Shawn

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Re: [tz] Dropping iso3166.tab
by Benjamin Kerensa May 21, 2013

May 21, 2013

On 05/20/13 22:27, Paul Eggert wrote: > I have been thinking of proposing to drop iso3166.tab from the > tz distribution, and to drop all uses of country codes. > This would help simplify maintenance, as it would mean > that the database would be unaffected by political > issues such as whether Kosovo is a country, what country > Jerusalem is in, what country Taipei is in, etc. The idea > is to simplify the database to help us focus on our charter > (namely, civil time) and to be less distracted by political > issues that do not affect the clocks. > > As part of this change, the first column of zone.tab > would change from its current role (a country code) > to be just a comment. > > I was thinking of changing the comment to be just "--", > for every entry in zone.tab. How would this change > affect FreeBSD's use of zone.tab? I'm unsure how this might affect FreeBSD but notably some Linux Distros including Ubuntu use this data and it could possibly impact Ubuntu's ubiquity installer. -- Benjamin Kerensa http://benjaminkerensa.com "I am what I am because of who we all are" - Ubuntu

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Re: [tz] Dropping iso3166.tab [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]
by Timothy Arceri May 20, 2013

May 20, 2013

> Please don't drop it. PHP's date/time support makes use of the country codes to allow selection of possible timezones per country: > http://us2.php.net/manual/en/datetimezone.listidentifiers.php I'm pretty sure Ubuntus installer (ubiquity) does the same thing.

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Re: [tz] Proposal to use Asia/Tel_Aviv for Israel - Jerusalem is not internationally recognized as part of Israel
by Ephraim Silverberg May 13, 2013

May 13, 2013

With regard to the populations of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, there are two municipal entities: the Municipality of Jerusalem and the Municipality of Tel-Aviv-Jafo (note that Tel-Aviv and Jafo are one municipal entity so perhaps Asia/Tel_Aviv_Jafo would be a better way to express this alias to Asia/Jerusalem) -- see http://www.tel-aviv.gov.il/ There concepts Greater/Metro Jerusalem and Greater/Metro Tel-Aviv are literary and, perhaps, political concepts but do not represent any real municipal boundaries. The term "Greater Jerusalem" would include cities such as Bethlehem, Mevaseret Zion and perhaps the "E1" areas between Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumin. So too "Greater Tel Aviv" would include the adjacent cities Givatayim, Ramat Gan, Bnei Brak and perhaps Petach Tikva. However, these concepts have no actual governing bodies and each of the adjacent cities have there own distinct and independent municipality. The Central Bureau of Statistics records the population of Jerusalem as 772,982 while the population of Tel-Aviv-Jafo is 403,738. The whole discussion of the de jure status of Jerusalem is disingenuous since the vast majority of the world countries de facto have regarded the west portion of Jerusalem not only as part of Israel but the seat of its government since February 1949. Foreign dignitaries and heads of state are received at government offices in western Jerusalem. Presidents Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush have addressed the Knesset directly as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Moreover, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat addressed the Knesset in November 1977 _prior_ to the signing of the Camp David peace accords. All ambassadors to Israel present their credentials to Israel's President at the Presidential Residence in western Jerusalem. It is correct that most foreign officials avoiding meeting Israeli officials at offices in eastern Jerusalem although this rule too has its exceptions as in the case of Canada's Foreign Minister John Baird meeting with Israel's Justice Minister Tzipi Livni at her eastern Jerusalem office last month. I could bring a wealth of quotes that foreign officials have stated with regard to Jerusalem and western Jerusalem in particular over the years. However, I regards this forum as a professional forum for discussing timezone changes past, present and future as well as the maintenance of the timezone files themselves and the C code for the timezone software and, hence, view all discussions of a political nature as raising the noise/signal ration here. There are a plethora of forums for debating such issues for those who wish to do so. _____________________________________ Ephraim Silverberg, CSE System Group, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. Phone/Fax number: +972-2-5494521

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Old CLDR tz chart link in tz-link.htm
by yoshito_umaoka＠us.ibm.com May 10, 2013

May 10, 2013

tz-link.html in tzcode2013c contains a link to the CLDR tzid chart page as below: <li>Some Microsoft Windows versions contain time zone information in an undocumented format, with IDs that can be mapped to <code>TZ</code> values using the <a href=" http://unicode.org/repos/cldr-tmp/trunk/diff/supplemental/zone_tzid.html ">Zone → Tzid table</a> maintained by the <abbr title="Common Locale Data Repository">CLDR</abbr> data mentioned below.</li> The URL is not permanent (cldr-tmp) and the linked page contains out of date information (CLDR 21 - latest version is 23). The correct URL is http://unicode.org/cldr/charts/supplemental/zone_tzid.html Please fix the link in the next tz version. Thanks, Yoshito

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Re: [tz] Proposal to use Asia/Tel_Aviv for Israel - Jerusalem is not internationally recognized as part of Israel
by Marc Lehmann May 9, 2013

May 9, 2013

On Tue, May 07, 2013 at 05:15:04PM -0400, random832(a)fastmail.us wrote: > On Tue, May 7, 2013, at 16:01, Marc Lehmann wrote: > > Yes, at least one timezone exists for any region, by definition, as > > long as that region actually has a physical location, as the timezone > > identifiers are meant to (roughly) identify the largest city within a > > region (where region is not defined by political boundaries). > > This is where you are mistaken. You surely have some evidence to back this up? The timezone database has always defined timezone regions that way. Saying it ain't so doesn't make it so. > The regions are _absolutely_ defined by political boundaries. It's why That is your _goal_, yes, but where does it say so? For one thing, the ISO 3166 codes do not define regions nor political boundaries, nor do the timezone identifier define political boundaries (but regions). It really seems to me that you want to unilaterally redefine the meaning of timezones and regions to further your political agenda - if you interpret the timezone database data traditionally and without prejuduice it doesn't say what you wish it to say. The political interpretation of the data is yours alone. -- The choice of a Deliantra, the free code+content MORPG -----==- _GNU_ http://www.deliantra.net ----==-- _ generation ---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / schmorp(a)schmorp.de -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\

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Proposal to use Asia/Tel_Aviv for Israel - Jerusalem is not internationally recognized as part of Israel
by Tobias Conradi May 8, 2013

May 8, 2013

== Current IANA time zone database situation == ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/zone.tab contains one zone for ISO country code "IL" named Asia/Jerusalem. IL decodes to ISRAEL http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/iso-3166-1_decoding_tab… == Problem == Jerusalem is internationally not recognized as part of Israel. Using Jerusalem as reference location for Israel in the IANA time zone database may thus violate UN resolutions. == Solution == ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory reads "Use the most populous among locations in a country's time zone", this seems to be Tel Aviv. That would mean using Asia/Tel_Aviv. == Information on the status of Jerusalem == No UN member has an embassy in Jerusalem says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positions_on_Jerusalem There is no UN LOCODE for Jerusalem in the IL-file: http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/cefact/locode/il.htm The page http://www.un.org/Depts/dpi/palestine/ links to "The Status of Jerusalem" http://www.un.org/Depts/dpi/palestine/ch12.pdf The penultimate paragraph reads: "The General Assembly revisited the question of Jerusalem at its fifty-fifth session. In a resolution adopted on 1 December 2000, the Assembly determined that the decision of Israel to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration on the Holy City of Jerusalem was illegal and, therefore, null and void. The Assembly also deplored the transfer by some States of their diplomatic missions to Jerusalem in violation of Security Council resolution 478 (1980)." The UN SC Resolution 478 can be found at http://www.un.org/documents/sc/res/1980/scres80.htm -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com

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tabs vs spaces
by David Muir Sharnoff May 8, 2013

May 8, 2013

I wanted to extract some of the data from the timezone files so I wrote a quick parser for them. In the process I discovered 1,477 lines that have spaces where they should have tabs. Do you care? If so, do you want to fix them with (a) my fixup script (b) a patch that I generate; (c) by hand -- I can list the file names and line numbers? -Dave

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Israel
by David Patte ₯ May 7, 2013

May 7, 2013

I will suggest, as I did a month ago for Australia, that we prepare an alternate patch for the tz database - this time for Israel. We can prepare it offline, to cut down on the noise here, and submit it for approval to the maintainers of the tz database, for their perusal. In the mean time, I am willing to host the preparation and patch on my own site and ftp server. The goal in the patch will be to try to follow the decisions re Jerusalem mandated by the UN security council, the UN general assembly, and accepted by all countries in the world (save Israel), which is to consider Israel's unilateral declaration of Jerusalem as its own as 'null and void', and fully remove Jerusalem as being listed within Israel. Those that consider this decision valuable could then apply it to the tz database themselves. Please contact me offline if you would like more information on how to contribute to this patch, or how to access the result.

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Re: [tz] Proposal to use Asia/Tel_Aviv for Israel - Jerusalem is not internationally recognized as part of Israel
by SM May 7, 2013

May 7, 2013

Hi Malcolm, At 09:55 07-05-2013, Wallace, Malcolm wrote: >One technical point worth considering is that a goodly proportion of >the clocks in Jerusalem do not show the time that the tz database >would claim they do. Given rough current estimates that the Arab >population of (East) Jerusalem is upwards of 35%, and the likelihood >that many of their clocks follow the Palestinian rules for DST >rather than the Israeli rules, it seems awkward and inaccurate to >use the name of the city for one set of rules but not the other. Thanks for the link. It's difficult to pick a source from that part of the world without bias. It's an unusual case. It's easier to leave it as it is until someone figures out how people at that location keep track of time. Regards, -sm

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