- tz - lists.iana.org

Re: [tz] Propose to improve where to find rules for "Indian/Kerguelen"
by SM May 16, 2012

May 16, 2012

At 23:30 15-05-2012, Mark Davis â wrote: >I firmly agree. Stability is far more important >than fiddling with the identifier names. Yes. >After all, the identifier names are really not >for human consumption; they need translation for >anything but English, and even for English need >some tweaking. And if people want to have >different groupings, that is easy to do. In >CLDR, for example, we group according to the >United Nations M.49 standard for continents and >subcontinents. (Cf >http://unicode.org/repos/cldr-tmp/trunk/diff/supplemental/territory_contain…) Some of the countries listed in Eastern Africa under M.49 are actually in another sub-continent in terms of political sub-continents. Greenland is part of North America and politically within Europe. Cyprus is categorized under Asia. If a rule of the thumb was needed, it could be to pick the continent where people in the region think they are. It avoids the "how many continents are there" question. Regards, -sm

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tz-announce Mailing List
by Kim Davies May 16, 2012

May 16, 2012

Dear all, We have established a new complimentary mailing list called tz-announce, which will be used solely for low-volume announcements of new editions of the tzdata or tzcode bundles, and other administration-related communications. This will allow those not interested in the detailed discussion relating to changes to have a method of getting announcements relating only to updates. Subscription information is at http://www.iana.org/time-zones kim

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Morocco Daylight Saving Time
by Mohamed Essedik Najd May 16, 2012

May 16, 2012

Good Morning Everyone; I am really glad that I have joined this mailing list. I just wanted to tell you that Morocco passed to DST during the last week end of April and this will remain active till the last weekend of September , with a suspension during Ramadan (Roughly between 20 July, 19 august, [Lunar Month, not sure yet]) If you can think of incorporating these changes during the new version of tzdata, our servers are suffering ! Regards -- *Mohamed Essedik Najd* Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Student Minor in Communication Studies Ifrane's Gtug Manager Google Student Ambassador Freelancer Phone: 00212 (0) 663 311 055 Google+ : http:/gplus.to/kensuke e-mail: es.najd(a)gmail.com website: http://kenix.info <http://blog.kenix.info/>

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Zones names - stability, translation, groupings, CLDR, find-ability
by Tobias Conradi May 16, 2012

May 16, 2012

was: [tz] Propose to improve where to find rules for "Indian/Kerguelen" On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM, Mark Davis ☕ <mark(a)macchiato.com> wrote: > I firmly agree. Stability is far more important than fiddling with the > identifier names. It's is documented practice of the tz project to "fiddle" with the "identifier names", if fiddling refers to changing them, and "identifier names" refers to zone names. Also different defining location are contained in one link in the backward file, e.g. ----- ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/data/backward ... # @(#)backward 8.11 ... # This file provides links between current names for time zones # and their old names. ... Link Africa/Bamako Africa/Timbuktu ----- Timbuktu is not an old name for the location Bamako. > After all, the identifier names are really not for human consumption; At least the tz project claims to attempt them to be: tzcode2012b/Theory "The time zone rule file naming conventions attempt to strike a balance among the following goals: * Indicate to humans as to where that region is. This simplifes use." > they > need translation for anything but English, America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires does not look as if it would "need" translation "for" Spanish. > And if people want to have > different groupings, that is easy to > do. Easy is relative. Even more "easy" would it be if there would be less desire to have different groupings. To do so the IANA tz project could follow international standards instead of using the current self-invented world partitioning system, e.g. "Australasia" along side "Asia", Bermuda in "Atlantic", Greenland in "America". > In CLDR, for example, we group according to the United Nations M.49 > standard for continents and subcontinents. > (Cf http://unicode.org/repos/cldr-tmp/trunk/diff/supplemental/territory_contain…) At least a try to match zones to an international standard continent model, but the document 1) is not monitorable by robots that respect robots.txt rules, e.g. the one from https://www.changedetection.com. http://unicode.org/robots.txt Disallow: /repos/cldr-tmp/ # dynamic 2) is out of date - zones are missing 3) has a n:m relationship for some cells in "Country (Territory)":"Time Zone" "Country (Territory)": Canary Islands [IC] Ceuta and Melilla [EA] map to one cell in "Time Zone" 4) has a n:m relationship for continent:zone, e.g. all zones matched to the "Subcontinent" element "Caribbean" are matched to three elements from the "Continent" column, namely to Americas 019, Latin America 419, and North America 003. 5) lists these seven "continents" as per the "Continent" column: Africa [002] Americas [019] Asia [142] Europe [150] Latin America [419] North America [003] Oceania [009] which form a set which is not used in any continent-model. Nor does it look very widespread to - have Latin America as continent at all, - omit in a full world model the continent Antarctica and to put the Antarctic Islands into Oceania. 6) contains names in the column headers which are not documented at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm, e.g. "Subcontinent" 7) contains unspecified names in the introduction, e.g. "CLDR supplements this table with the QO code for outlying areas". "QO code"? 8) doesn't specify which set of names is used for zone matching, it says: "As the last column, the timezone IDs for that country are listed." but "Asia/Kolkata" contained in zone.tab is not listed for India, instead "Asia/Calcutta" is which is not listed in zone.tab. Also the document doesn't name the last column close to what it claims to list, e.g. "timezone ID", instead it names the column "Time Zone". > And for programmers, grep or equivalent is fine. This is only true for the subset of programmers for which grep or equivalent is fine. It is not true for the others. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Propose to improve where to find rules for "Indian/Kerguelen"
by Tobias Conradi May 16, 2012

May 16, 2012

tzdata2012c/zone.tab contains TF ... Indian/Kerguelen But there is no file "indian" in tzdata2012c as there are "europe", "africa", "asia" for zones named "Europe/...", "Africa/...", "Asia/..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#TF - French Southern Territories TF is territory of France. But even knowing that Russian Asia/...-zones are contained in "europe" does not help as analogy, since "europe" which hosts FR-France does not contain the string "indian". Propose - to document this in "Theory" or - in "zone.tab" or - to create a file "indian" -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Real bug in tzdata: Macquarie
by OvV_HN May 14, 2012

May 14, 2012

tzdata2000c: australasia file: " # Macquarie # permanent occupation (scientific station) since 1948; # sealing and penguin oil station operated 1888/1917 # like Australia/Hobart " antarctica file: " Zone Antarctica/Macquarie 0 - zzz 1911 ..... 11:00 - MIST # Macquarie Island Time " No big deal, since Macquarie now has its own timezone, different from Australia/Hobart, but the Australia comments in the australia file should possibly be updated as well. Oscar van Vlijmen

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Tz-announce list
by James Diebel May 13, 2012

May 13, 2012

Hello, I don't mean to harp on this issue but my previous email on the topic has seemed not to have gotten the attention of the person responsible for maintaining the mailing list. The fact is that through the excellent work of the contributors to this project, the tz database has become an essential component in a wide variety of computer systems. As such there is a large community of developers who need to know when new official versions of the database are released. And while I think that I speak for most of us in saying that we have the utmost respect and appreciation for the process that is used to vet proposed changes to the database, it is simply not sensible for all of us non-contributing users to sift through the various emails on the tz mailing list just so that we don't miss the one email in a thousand that marks a new release. When I last raised this, some people responded that if only certain contributors were banned that the problem would go away. I defer to the list administrators on the question of who should be banned from the list and respectfully disagree that that would solve the actual issue. The tz database is an extremely important project and the wide and timely dissemination of updates to the tz database are in the interest of all who use it, directly or indirectly. It should be a primary goal of the project to create systems for notifying users of the database of updates that are most likely to draw widespread use. Any number of unwanted emails reduces the appeal of staying on a given list. I propose the creation of a new list dedicated to announcements of new versions. The only person allowed to post to that list should be the same person that posts updates to the tz database itself. A single post should be posted to the new announcements list at the same time that an update is released. Such posts should be the only posts on that list. Existing subscribers to this list should be automatically added to the new list. Following that, an email to this list should inform non-contributing users that they may now safely unsubscribe from this list. I do not intend to reopen any discussions of banning any users. I cordially ask that those subscribers to the list that agree with my proposal respond saying so. And I respectfully ask whomever is responsible for maintaining the list to respond with comment. Thank you for your time and attention. Cheers, James Sent from a mobile device

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Two elements in list of assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes not contained in zone.tab
by Tobias Conradi May 12, 2012

May 12, 2012

To aid the discussion on how much extra work it is to map all currently assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes to at least one zone, I did: 1) import a) a list of ISO 3166-1 codes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Officially_assigned_code_el… b) the list of ISO 3166-1 codes from tzdata2012c/zone.tab 2) performed the query SELECT DISTINCT(tz_zonelist.iso_3166_1), tz_countrylist.iso_3166_1 FROM tz_countrylist LEFT JOIN tz_zonelist ON tz_countrylist.iso_3166_1= tz_zonelist.iso_3166_1 ORDER BY `tz_zonelist`.`iso_3166_1` ASC 3) obtained the results iso_3166_1 iso_3166_1 NULL HM NULL BV AD AD ... That means the only ISO 3166-1 codes not mapped seem to be HM and BV. Any corrections welcome! -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Missing entry for Heard Island and MacDonald Islands
by dfg dfg May 12, 2012

May 12, 2012

Hi everyone, I am a developer by trade, so I am not sure if I have stumbled onto some missing data in the tz database. I am accessing the database using PHP (www.php.net) which uses the latest version of the tz database (2012.3). I can use one of the built in functions to lookup timezone information for a given country using its ISO 3166-1 two letter country code (http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetimezone.listidentifiers.php) I am currently building an application and found that Heard Island and MacDonald Islands (ISO code HM) does not exist in the database. After a quick look at the tz data, I was also not able to find anything about Heard Island and MacDonald Island in the files. I believe that there should be an entry for Heard Island and MacDonald Islands (HM) which uses the timezone Australia/Perth. Is it possible that the entry was intentionally excluded for some reason? Or was it just missing from the database? Cheers,John

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Re: [tz] zone.tab comments Canada - places -> locations
by Tobias Conradi May 11, 2012

May 11, 2012

was "[tz] zone.tab comments Canada - places -> locations [OT - English]" I return to on topic. On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 5:41 AM, Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis(a)systematicsw.ab.ca> wrote: .... >> C) >> I mean and meant location as in zone.tab >> "Central Standard Time - Saskatchewan - most locations" >> >> D) >> I mean and meant location as in Theory file: > ... > Use of location in Theory refers to a specific place > to be used as the time zone name. Not true. tzcode2012b\Theory: ----- Names of time zone rule files ----- Names normally have the form AREA/LOCATION, where AREA is the name of a continent or ocean, and LOCATION is the name of a specific location within that region. ---------------------------------------- I.e. the /name of a specific location/ is to be used as one /part/ of the time zone name. > Use of places in zone.tab comments refers to the general locales where the > same time zone is observed around the specific location used for the time > zone name; And the use of "locations" in zone.tab is the same. Following are some quotes from RFC 5545 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545 Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#page-28 Failure to include and follow VTIMEZONE definitions in iCalendar objects may lead to inconsistent understanding of the local time at any given location. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#page-64 Many locations adjust their Standard Time forward or backward by one hour, in order to accommodate seasonal changes in number of daylight hours, often referred to as Daylight Saving Time. Some locations adjust their time by a fraction of an hour. ... This database contains current and historical time zone information for a wide variety of locations around the globe http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.1.7 Property Name: LOCATION Purpose: This property defines the intended venue for the activity defined by a calendar component. The IETF GEOPRIV site https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/geopriv/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/geopriv/charter/ uses "location" and not "place". Some related ISO standards: a) ISO 19112:2003 Geographic information -- Spatial referencing by geographic identifiers 4.4 location identifiable geographic place found via http://www.iso.org/obp/ui/ b) http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm… ISO 6709:2008 Standard representation of geographic point location by coordinates c) http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnu… ISO 19133:2005 Geographic information -- Location-based services -- Tracking and navigation Annex: Background information for when the inconsistencies first occurred in the tzdb: tzdata1996l/zone.tab did only have "most locations" and no "most places" America/Halifax Atlantic Time - Nova Scotia (most locations), New Brunswick, Labrador & PEI But did have America/Glace_Bay Atlantic Time - Nova Scotia - places that did not observe DST 1966-1971 America/Nipigon Eastern Time - Ontario & Quebec - places that did not observe DST 1967-1973 tzdata1998a/zone.tab maybe earlier, contains "most places" once: America/Halifax Atlantic Time - Nova Scotia (most places), NB, W Labrador, E Quebec & PEI And twelve times "most locations". -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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