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Historical data for Iran
by Roozbeh Pournader June 6, 2022

June 6, 2022

Hi, The timezone database currently lists Iran switching to standard time in 1946. I've been doing some research on the history of the adoption of standard time by Iran, and while it's very hard to find much, I found that the correct date is actually 1935. Here's an order from the Cabinet to the rest of the government to switch to Tehran time, which is mentioned to be already at +03:30: https://qavanin.ir/Law/TreeText/180138 Just in case that goes away, I also saved a copy at archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20220530111940/https://qavanin.ir/Law/TreeText/… Here's my translation: "Circular on Matching the Hours of Governmental and Official Circles in Provinces Approved 1314/03/22 [=1935-06-13] According to the ruling of the Honorable Cabinet, it is ordered that from now on in all internal provinces of the country, governmental and official circles set their time to match Tehran time (three hours and half before Greenwich). It is required to mind the above order. For Minister of Judiciary, Dr Matin-Daftari" Now, I still haven't found out when Tehran itself switched to +03:30 (let's assume some time earlier in 1935), but it is clear that standard time in Iran started on 1935-06-13 and not 1946. Thanks, Roozbeh

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Yet more historical data for Iran
by Roozbeh Pournader June 2, 2022

June 2, 2022

Yet another discovery, which clarifies what happened in 1977 and 1978 in Iran. This is from Kayhan newspaper, one of the major Iranian newspapers, from March 20, 1978, page 2: "Pull the clocks 60 minutes forward As we informed before, from the fourth day of the month Farvardin of the new year [=1978-03-24], clocks will be pulled forward, and people's daily work and life program will start one hour earlier than the current program. On the 1st day of the month Farvardin of this year [=1977-03-21], they had pulled the clocks forward by one hour, but in the month of Mehr [=1977-09-23], the clocks were pulled back by 30 minutes. In this way, from the 4th day of the month Farvardin, clocks will be ahead of the previous years by one hour and a half. According to the new program, during the night of 4th of Farvardin, when the midnight, meaning 24 o'clock is announced, the hands of the clock must be pulled forward by one hour and thus consider midnight 1 o'clock in the forenoon." This implies that in September 1977, when the daylight savings time was done with, Iran didn't go back to +03:30, but immediately to +04:00. I'm still trying to figure out when exactly did Iran go back from +4:00 to +03:30. I'll report back when I find it. Based on the time of true noon announced in newspapers of the time, I've triangulated it to some time between 1978-11-05 and 1979-01-15, but it looks like major Iranian newspapers were stopped from publishing during most of that time period, so I can't figure out more using this method. For now, two changes are needed in tzdata, first is the start of daylight saving in 1978, the other the switch to +4:00/+5:00, which is currently listed as Nov 1977, but should change to exactly the end of daylight saving time in 1977. Thanks again, Roozbeh

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End date of daylight saving in Iran in 1978
by Roozbeh Pournader June 1, 2022

June 1, 2022

I just found the date daylight savings ended in Iran in 1978. This is from the major Iranian newspaper Ettela'at, dated 1968-08-03, page 32. It looks like they decided to get the clocks back to +4:00 just in time for Ramadan that year: "Tomorrow Night, Pull the Clocks Back by One Hour At 1 o'clock in the forenoon of Saturday 14 Mordad [=1978-08-05], the clocks will be pulled one hour back and instead of 1 o'clock in the forenoon, Radio Iran will announce 24 o'clock. This decision was made in the Cabinet of Ministers meeting of 25 Tir [=1978-07-16], [...] At the beginning of the year 2537 [=March 1978: Iran was using a different year number for a few years then, based on the Coronation of Cyrus the Great], the country's official time was pulled forward by one hour and now the official time is one hour and a half ahead compared to last year, because in Farvardin of last year [=March 1977], the official time was pulled forward one hour and this continued until the second half of last year [=September 1977] until in the second half of last year the official time was pulled back half an hour and that half hour still remains." This matches the time of the true noon published in the newspapers, as they clearly go from +05:00 to +04:00 after that date (which happened during a long weekend in Iran). This means tzdata needs to fix the end of daylight saving in Iran for 1978 from October 20 to August 5. Thanks again, Roozbeh

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Wrong behaviour with truncated TZif files
by Almaz Mingaleev June 1, 2022

June 1, 2022

Hi Paul, I've built TZif files with following commands: mkdir /tmp/zic cd /tmp/zic git clone https://github.com/eggert/tz.git . make -C . zic make -C . NDATA= rearguard.zi mkdir data # Truncate at 1 Jan 2100. ./zic -b fat -r "/@4102444800" -d ./data rearguard.zi make TZDIR="./data" all Then I've compiled attached file: g++ mktime_test.cpp localtime.o Test tries to find epoch timestamp for 2 Jul 1980 midnight at America/Los_Angeles. With a truncated TZif file it prints 331344000. With non-truncated one it prints 331372800. The latter is the right answer. Also, date command is wrong on certain time zones: make TZDIR="./data" date TZ=Antarctica/Palmer ./date -r -631152000 prints "Sat Dec 31 20:00:00 -04 1949" even though 1 Jan 1950 offset should be zero <https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/df4699ddfc9caf6f875f1e38703dd0ef41826175/…> . Thanks, Almaz

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More historical data for Iran
by Roozbeh Pournader June 1, 2022

June 1, 2022

Two more pieces of information about historical timezone changes in Iran, this time in the late 1970s: I just ran into an academic paper that looks into the psychology of daylight savings in Iran, and it has the exact times for the change in 1977 and the beginning of the change in 1979 (but not its end, unfortunately). https://www.jstor.org/stable/178704 Here's the quotes from the paper: 1. '"Iran's official time keeper moved the clock one hour forward as from March 22, 1977 (Farvardin 2, 2536) to make maximum use of daylight and save in energy consumption. Thus Iran joined such other countries as Britain in observing what is known as 'daylight saving.' The proposal was originally put forward by the Ministry of Energy, in no way having any influence on observing religious ceremonies. Moving time one hour forward in summer means that at 11:00 o'clock on March 21, the official time was set as midnight March 22. Then September 24 will actually begin one hour later than the end of September 23 [...]." Iran's time base thus continued to be Greenwich Mean Time plus three and one-half hours (plus four and one-half hours in summer).' The article sources this from Iran Almanac and Book of Facts, 1977, Tehran: Echo of Iran, which is on Google Books at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Iran_Almanac_and_Book_of_Facts/9ybVAAA…. (I confirmed it by searching for snippets.) 2. "After the fall of the shah, the revolutionary government returned to daylight-saving time (DST) on 26 May 1979." This seems to have been announced just one day in advance, on 25 May 1979. The change in 1977 clearly seems to be the first daylight savings effort in Iran. But the article doesn't mention what happened in 1978 (which was still during the shah's government), or how things continued in 1979 onwards (which was during the Islamic Republic). This data doesn't seem to match tzdata: First, an entry for 1977 needs to be added, for which we seem to have complete data. Second, the beginning of daylight saving time in 1979 needs to be changed to May 26. Thanks, Roozbeh

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Re: [tz] Kiev -> Kyiv
by Doug Ewell May 31, 2022

May 31, 2022

Jacob Pratt wrote: >> I know you are all busy, but you made a mistake in the timezone name. >> Just want to make a request to change "Kiev" to "Kyiv". > > This change has already been made. People keep asking for this because the currently released version of the tz database (2022a) still has "Europe/Kiev". The fact that the change to "Europe/Kyiv" is in the GitHub development repo, and will eventually make its way to a released version, is not helpful to these people. They want to see it in a release. -- Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org

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Kiev -> Kyiv
by Roman Dmytriv May 30, 2022

May 30, 2022

Hello IANA team! "After Ukraine's 1991 independence, the Ukrainian government introduced the national rules for transliteration of geographic names <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Ukrainian> into the Latin alphabet for legislative and official acts in October 1995,[23] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Kyiv#cite_note-:1-23> according to which the Ukrainian name Київ is romanized <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization> as *Kyiv*. These rules are applied for place names and addresses, as well as personal names in passports, street signs, and so on." I know you are all busy, but you made a mistake in the timezone name. Just want to make a request to change "Kiev" to "Kyiv". I will be grateful for the answer. Thank you! Best regards, Roman Dmytriv tel: +380633709302

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Change some timezone names
by gusak ivanov May 27, 2022

May 27, 2022

Good evening! I’ve read some great news, that you are finally changing Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv. Can other Ukrainian timezones get the same treatment, and so get Europe/Uzhgorod to be changed to Europe/Uzhhorod and Europe/Zaporozhye to Europe/Zaporizhzhia? All according to the officially recognized UNGEGN World Geographical Names. Thanks

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Duplicated shell commands on the tz-link.html IANA page
by Max Nikulin May 25, 2022

May 25, 2022

Hi, Some time ago I have noticed that shell commands are duplicated in the "Downloading the tz database" section on the following page https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tz-link.html#download > mkdir tzdb > cd tzdb > wget https://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tzcode-latest.tar.gz > wget https://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tzdata-latest.tar.gz > gzip -dc tzcode-latest.tar.gz | tar -xf - > gzip -dc tzdata-latest.tar.gz | tar -xf - I think it is better to remove some commands.

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Unexpected last transition in Africa/Casablanca
by Almaz Mingaleev May 19, 2022

May 19, 2022

Hi Paul, Here are the last transitions in Africa/Casablanca output (rearguard format): transition,type,[UTC time],[Type offset],[Type isDST] 3672612000,1,2086-05-19T02:00:00Z,PT1H,DST 3699828000,2,2087-03-30T02:00:00Z,PT0S,STD 3703456800,3,2087-05-11T02:00:00Z,PT1H,STD So change is from standard to standard, even though offset changes from 0h to 1h. Is that expected behaviour? As Africa/El_Aaiun is using Morocco rules, its transitions are also affected. This affects 64-bit section only, 32-bit section looks fine to me. Thanks, Almaz Data above is output of debug tools used in Android. The way I've built data an byte manipulations if needed: mkdir /tmp/zic cd /tmp/zic git clone https://github.com/eggert/tz.git . make -C . zic make -C . NDATA= rearguard.zi mkdir data ./zic -b fat -d ./data rearguard.zi byte manipulations: Let's skip 32-bit header: xxd -seek 20 -c 4 -l 24 data/Africa/Casablanca typecnt: 94 timecnt: 5 charcnt: 12 32-bit block size = 94 * 4 + 94 + 5 * 6 + 12 = 512 64-bit start = 44 + 512 = 556 64-bit header: xxd -seek 576 -c 4 -l 24 data/Africa/Casablanca: timecnt: 196 typecnt: 4 <- 32-bit section has 5 charcnt: 12 transition types offset: 556 + 44 + 196 * 8 = 2168 xxd -seek 2168 -c 1 -l 196 data/Africa/Casablanca ... 00000934: 02 . 00000935: 01 . 00000936: 02 . 00000937: 01 . 00000938: 02 . 00000939: 01 . 0000093a: 02 . 0000093b: 03 . <- the last transition local time records offset = 556 + 44 + 196 * 9 = 2364 xxd -seek 2364 -c 6 -l 24 data/Africa/Casablanca 0000093c: ffff f8e4 0000 ...... 00000942: 0000 0e10 0104 ...... 00000948: 0000 0000 0008 ...... <- standard time 0000094e: 0000 0e10 0004 ...... <- also standard time

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Change IANA time zone identifier for Kyiv to Europe/Kyiv.
by Luda Melnykova May 19, 2022

May 19, 2022

Hello, Hope this email finds you well. I would like to raise a request for a value change in TZ DB. I believe, that current IANA time zone identifier for Kyiv (Europe/K*ie*v) is not fully correct. Background of this request lies in a transliteration of a city name. *Kyiv* is derived from the Ukrainian language name Київ, while *Kiev* is derived from the Russian language name Киев) as the name of the Ukrainian capital. Kyiv is already in use in international lists for IATA, ICAO and other organizations, which follow the decision of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Kyiv, as a name of Ukrainian capital, is also mentioned on time.is site Kyiv: 19:42 (time.is) <https://time.is/Kyiv>. So, I believe, it is fully logical to follow latest guidelines and rename IANA time zone identifier as well. If you are interested to learn more about it, please check out this wiki article: KyivNotKiev - Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KyivNotKiev> Please let me know if any questions or concerns. Many thanks. Regards, Liudmyla

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Time in Russian occupied Ukraine
by alois＠astro.ch May 14, 2022

May 14, 2022

Does anyone know which time zone is used in the "separatist" or Russian occupied areas of eastern Ukraine? Or in the areas temporarily occupied during Russian invasion in the north of Kiev, from which Russia has withdrawn again? Until 27 March 2022, Ukraine was on 2h east, while western Russia was on 3h east (Europe/Moscow), like Crimea (Europe/Simferopol). Now since the begin of DST they have the same time offset.

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2021e Asia/Dushanbe
by Nick Deguillaume May 14, 2022

May 14, 2022

Hello, I am currently developing a C++ time-zone database parser, building on top of Howard Hinnant's work. I am writing thorough checks. One Zone check that I am experimenting with is: *If the FORMAT field contains either a "%s" or a '/' then the RULES field must contain a named rule.* However line 3840 of the asia file in: https://data.iana.org/time-zones/releases/tzdata2021e.tar.gz fails this check, as highlighted in yellow in the table below. # Tajikistan # From Shanks & Pottenger. # Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone Asia/Dushanbe 04:35:12 - LMT 1924 May 2 5:00 - +05 1930 Jun 21 6:00 RussiaAsia +06/+07 1991 Mar 31 2:00s 5:00 1:00 +05/+06 1991 Sep 9 2:00s 05:00 - +05 My guess is that '+05/+06' should be '+05'. I may well be wrong. Could you let me know either way? If you are interested, I have found a few other bits and pieces where the data files are in slight variance with the documentation but are not show-stoppers. Most of these occur in the very early releases. (I am testing every database available on https://data.iana.org/time-zones/releases/) Regards Nick Deguillaume +44 75 2828 6473

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Changes to timezone names
by Ростислав Салабай May 12, 2022

May 12, 2022

Good morning! Since Kyiv became an official spelling of the capital of Ukraine, few years have passed. And people more and more use the new spelling, instead of Kiev. That includes large and small news sites, posts of politicians and most social media feeds (seeing Kiev right now is much more rare than Kyiv). Even Wikipedia and Oxford English Dictionary have changed their spellings to Kyiv too, and large companies like Apple follow along. And actually, using Kiev causes more inconvenience for some people than Kyiv, in things that use tz database, as many are unable to find the right timezone (and this isn't something made up, I've seen lots of complains in forums and GitHub issue requests that Kyiv is missing or spelled wrong). Also, the outgoing war in Ukraine has sped up that process of switching Ukraine to Ukrainian-based things, and not Russian ones. So, in my opinion, it's the perfect time to finally ditch Kiev for good, and start using Kyiv (and so the Europe/Kyiv timezone) as the only name for that beautiful city. Rostyslav

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Updates on Iranian Time Zone (IRDT)
by Mohammad Ali Tofighi May 11, 2022

May 11, 2022

Hi. Recently the Iranian parliament has decided to remove daylight saving from the Iranian time zone, eliminating the one-hour shift in the summer time. Hence, it is always going to be UTC+3:30. *This is not their final decision yet* and there is a final confirmation to be made, but I just wanted to inform you about the update to prepare possible modifications. I'm a software engineer and if we have the update on *tzdata* package as soon as possible, the software companies can adjust themselves accordingly. Please read these official news: https://www.isna.ir/news/1400122419045/ https://www.yjc.news/00Xw0k Regards, Ali Tofighi

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Request to provide .tar.gz tarballs for tzdb
by Kim Davies May 6, 2022

May 6, 2022

Dear colleagues, We’ve been asked by this correspondent to forward this request on to this list. In response to the original request we explained the lzip distribution is largely an amalgam of the gzip distributions, and they indicated they still wanted gzip to be considered specifically to increase “availability for low end systems as lzip isn’t that widely supported”: Subject: Provide .tar.gz tarballs for tzdb Date: Mon, 2 May 2022 13:23:15 +0300 From: "Firas Khalil Khana" <firasuke(a)gmail.com> To: iana(a)iana.org Hey there, I've come to notice that both tzcode and tzdata have .tar.gz tarballs but tzdb only has .tar.lz (lzip) tarballs which isn't a commonly used format. Would it be possible to provide gzipped tarballs for tzdb as well? Thanks! -- Kim Davies VP, IANA Services, ICANN President, PTI

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Changes to the tz database
by Shlomi Sasson May 1, 2022

May 1, 2022

hi, i opened this PR <https://github.com/rogierschouten/tzdata-generate/pull/11> on GitHub and I've been told I need to contact you, and specifically Paul Eggert, to fix it. The fix should replace the Ukrainian city Kiev with the official name Kyiv, put Kiev in the legacy zone and add Kyiv to a new zone (per Rogier Schouten <https://github.com/rogierschouten>) Can u pls help me fix that? -- Shlomi Sasson Engineering Group Manager, Bringg +972-52-4440986

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Prague Astronomical Clock simulation
by Kerry Shetline April 21, 2022

April 21, 2022

While not precisely a timezone topic, I thought a simulation of the Prague Astronomical Clock might be of interest to the readers of this mailing list. I stumbled into this topic a few months ago and I find it fascinating. There aren't too many pieces of machinery that are over 600 years old and still running. Now, of course, it's not still all the original equipment in place today, and there has been a lot of downtime over the centuries as interest waxed and waned over keeping the clock running. Major components of the original clock, however, are still in service today. Having looked at other old astronomical clocks, the one in Prague, in my opinion, beats them all. For something first operational in 1410, it's a very ambitious and clever design that puts a lot of information into view all at once, in an attractive and compelling way: two different ways of counting the hours of the day, phases of the moon, position of the moon and the sun in the sky, sun rise and set times, and sidereal time. One of the things I discovered was Jan Tošovský's simulation of clock, which had some attractive SVG graphics, but a user interface that's a bit out of date and clunky by modern UI standards. I used his graphics as a starting point for my own simulation, which can now be found at https://orloj.org/orloj/. I received a lot of help and advice from Petr Král, the current "clock master", and founder of the Czech Horological Society, about the real, physical clock, its operation and history -- not to mention that he helped make sure my translation to Czech wasn't too far out of whack. By the way, if anyone takes a look at the site who speaks Spanish, French, or German, I'd love to hear about any suggestions for improved translations you might have. I used to do a lot of work in the past to make sure code was internationalizable, but this is my first multi-language Angular web application.

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some problems with tzdata for Simferopol
by Michael H Deckers April 18, 2022

April 18, 2022

In version 2022a of the file "europe", we read for Simferopol: # The _Economist_ (1994-05-28, p 45) reports that central Crimea switched # from Kiev to Moscow time sometime after the January 1994 elections. # Shanks (1999) says "date of change uncertain", but implies that it happened # sometime between the 1994 DST switches. Shanks & Pottenger simply say # 1994-09-25 03:00, but that can't be right. For now, guess it # changed in May. 2:00 C-Eur EE%sT 1994 May # From IATA SSIM (1994/1997), which also says that Kerch is still like Kiev. 3:00 E-Eur MSK/MSD 1996 Mar 31 0:00s 3:00 1:00 MSD 1996 Oct 27 3:00s # IATA SSIM (1997-09) says Crimea switched to EET/EEST. # Assume it happened in March by not changing the clocks. 3:00 Russia MSK/MSD 1997 3:00 - MSK 1997 Mar lastSun 1:00u • The quoted text is inconsistent: The comment says that Simferopol uses Moscow time since 1994 May, but the Zone line "3:00 E-Eur MSK/MSD 1996 Mar 31 0:00s" contradicts it (Moscow had other switching times between summer and winter times). Which is correct? • It is not clear what "IATA SSIM (1994/1997)" actually says. They probably do not specify the switching times expressed with the Zone line "3:00 E-Eur MSK/MSD 1996 Mar 31 0:00s" or do they? • The Zone line "3:00 Russia MSK/MSD 1997" is redundant. Michael Deckers.

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No permanent Maryland DST
by Arthur David Olson April 12, 2022

April 12, 2022

This year's regular session of Maryland's state legislature has ended. House Bill 126, establishing permanent Daylight Saving time (with contingencies) had been approved by the House of Delegates on a 108-24 vote; it was not approved by the Senate. We'll see what (if anything) happens at the national level. @dashdashado

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Re: [tz] Wrong name of timezone
by Pierpaolo Bernardi April 11, 2022

April 11, 2022

Il giorno 25 ottobre 2021, alle ore 16:58, Igor Melnyk via tz <tz(a)iana.org> ha scritto: >But Ukraine has the Ukrainian language and Kiev is in russian language. The correct name of the capital city of Ukraine is Kyiv. Kiev is English language, as every other name in the db, not russian. It is only a coincidence that the English name is more similar to russian than to Ukrainian.

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Timekeeping videos
by Tim Parenti April 5, 2022

April 5, 2022

A pair of time-related videos in my recommendations today, Monday 2022-04-04: At 16:00 BST (+01), Tom Scott published a video called "How does Britain know what time it is?" about the radio time broadcasts from the UK's National Physical Laboratory, which disseminates UTC(NPL). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqciKS_N0K8 Typical of his attention to detail, the wall clock Tom holds continues to tick true to time throughout the entire video, even as it cuts away to interview shots and B-roll. A couple hours later, at 18:00 BST, the British comedy panel quiz show "QI" published a clip of their episode "Rude", originally aired 2020-05-28, in which the panel discusses, among other things, how Denmark hasn't updated its laws to officially use UTC instead of Mean Solar Time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRMD9LRmRA4 -- Tim Parenti

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[Confirmation] America/Punta_Arenas will keep UTC -3 "indefinitely"
by Juan Correa April 3, 2022

April 3, 2022

Hello everyone: As almost all Continenal Chile just jumped back to UTC -4; I found there was a decree published last Thursday that will keep Magallanes region to UTC -3 "indefinitely" The decree is available at https://www.diariooficial.interior.gob.cl/publicaciones/2022/03/31/43217-B/… ; and it's a modification of Decreto 1286/2018 Its only paragraph say: "Nevertheless the aforementioned, the change of the Chile Continental Official time for Magallanes and Antártica Chile region will be extended indefinitely; and will be permanently set to GMT (sic) -3" -- Juan Correa Poblete PS Labs (http://www.pslabs.cl)

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zone file format very strict
by Alois Treindl April 1, 2022

April 1, 2022

Hi I noticed that the last line of a zone file like # Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone Asia/Kabul 4:36:48 - LMT 1890 4:00 - +04 1945 4:30 - +0430 does not suffer a trailing TAB character, behind the +0430 I think the zone file compiling mechanism could be a bit more tolerant of trailing white space. The issue came about because I employ a zone file generator utility, which accidentally created such trailing tabs in some cases. I fixed my generator, but wanted to mention this anyway.

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TZDB talk tomorrow at LibrePlanet 2022
by Paul Eggert April 1, 2022

April 1, 2022

Tomorrow, March 19, at 21:15–22:00 UTC (17:15–18:00 US Eastern time) I plan to deliver a talk "TZDB and some challenges of long data" at the all-online LibrePlanet 2022 conference. LibrePlanet is a conference about software freedom, happening on March 19–20, 2022. The event is hosted by the Free Software Foundation, and brings together software developers, law and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face upcoming challenges. Newcomers are welcome, and LibrePlanet 2022 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels. You can register for the conference in advance at <https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=99>.

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