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PD notices
by Zefram Sept. 25, 2013

Sept. 25, 2013

I have some code that repackages the tz database, and along the way it checks that the subset that it's repackaging is in the public domain. The check is required because not all of the files are PD (some of the man pages are BSD licensed), and the license statement on the automatically-generated package needs to be correct. The code checks by looking for the notices that are at the top of most of the files. I have found that it quite frequently gets broken by small changes in file formatting, or new files with novel format. 2013e broke it by adding leap-seconds.list, and 2013f has just broken it again by adding NEWS. Can we come up with some consistent formatting rules to make the PD notices machine readable? It doesn't have to be a single structure for all file types, just a limited repertoire that code can reliably apply. Or a separate machine-readable list of files with a single statement that the listed files are all PD. -zefram

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Gaza/West Bank likely to end DST 1 hour earlier
by Steffen Thorsen Sept. 25, 2013

Sept. 25, 2013

The Gaza and West Bank are ending DST Thursday at midnight (2013-09-27 00:00:00) (one hour earlier than last year and current rule in tzdata). This source in English, says "that winter time will go into effect at midnight on Thursday in the West Bank and Gaza Strip": http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=23246 and also mentions it here: http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=23254 The official source and this other source in Arabic, with Google Translate translates to "Friday night", we assume this English source was based on this government source, and that midnight between Thursday and Friday is correct: http://www.palestinecabinet.gov.ps/ar/Views/ViewDetails.aspx?pid=1252 http://felesteen.ps/details/news/100581/%D8%A8%D8%AF%D8%A1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%… Best regards, Steffen Thorsen - timeanddate.com

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America/Montreal has been Removed in the zone.tab file for 2013e?
by Richard Andersen (TT) Sept. 24, 2013

Sept. 24, 2013

Hi, I have noticed that “America/Montreal” entry was removed from the zone.tab file in the 2013e release. I am not sure if this is a mistake, but I wanted someone to know… Thanks!

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tzcode2013e and tzdata2013e available
by Paul Eggert Sept. 24, 2013

Sept. 24, 2013

The 2013e release of the tz code and data is available. It reflects the following changes circulated on the tz mailing list: Changes affecting near-future time stamps This year Fiji will start DST on October 27, not October 20. (Thanks to David Wheeler for the heads-up.) For now, guess that Fiji will continue to spring forward the Sunday before the fourth Monday in October. Changes affecting current and future time zone abbreviations Use WIB/WITA/WIT rather than WIT/CIT/EIT for alphabetic Indonesian time zone abbreviations since 1932. (Thanks to George Ziegler, Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo, Zakaria, Jason Grimes, Martin Pitt, and Benny Lin.) This affects Asia/Dili, Asia/Jakarta, Asia/Jayapura, Asia/Makassar, and Asia/Pontianak. Use ART (UTC-3, standard time), rather than WARST (also UTC-3, but daylight saving time) for San Luis, Argentina since 2009. Changes affecting Godthab time stamps after 2037 if version mismatch Allow POSIX-like TZ strings where the transition time's hour can range from -167 through 167, instead of the POSIX-required 0 through 24. E.g., TZ='FJT-12FJST,M10.3.1/146,M1.3.4/75' for the new Fiji rules. This is a more-compact way to represent far-future time stamps for America/Godthab, America/Santiago, Antarctica/Palmer, Asia/Gaza, Asia/Hebron, Asia/Jerusalem, Pacific/Easter, and Pacific/Fiji. Other zones are unaffected by this change. (Derived from a suggestion by Arthur David Olson.) Allow POSIX-like TZ strings where daylight saving time is in effect all year. E.g., TZ='WART4WARST,J1/0,J365/25' for Western Argentina Summer Time all year. This supports a more-compact way to represent the 2013d data for America/Argentina/San_Luis. Because of the change for San Luis noted above this change does not affect the current data. (Thanks to Andrew Main (Zefram) for suggestions that improved this change.) Where these two TZ changes take effect, there is a minor extension to the tz file format in that it allows new values for the embedded TZ-format string, and the tz file format version number has therefore been increased from 2 to 3 as a precaution. Version-2-based client code should continue to work as before for all time stamps before 2038. Existing version-2-based client code (tzcode, GNU/Linux, Solaris) has been tested on version-3-format files, and typically works in practice even for time stamps after 2037; the only known exception is America/Godthab. Changes affecting time stamps before 1970 Pacific/Johnston is now a link to Pacific/Honolulu. This corrects some errors before 1947. Some zones have been turned into links, when they differ from existing zones only in older data that was likely invented or that differs only in LMT or transition from LMT. These changes affect only time stamps before 1943. The affected zones are: Africa/Juba, America/Anguilla, America/Aruba, America/Dominica, America/Grenada, America/Guadeloupe, America/Marigot, America/Montserrat, America/St_Barthelemy, America/St_Kitts, America/St_Lucia, America/St_Thomas, America/St_Vincent, America/Tortola, and Europe/Vaduz. (Thanks to Alois Treindl for confirming that the old Europe/Vaduz zone was wrong and the new link is better for WWII-era times.) Change Kingston Mean Time from -5:07:12 to -5:07:11. This affects America/Cayman, America/Jamaica and America/Grand_Turk time stamps from 1890 to 1912. Change the UT offset of Bern Mean Time from 0:29:44 to 0:29:46. This affects Europe/Zurich time stamps from 1853 to 1894. (Thanks to Alois Treindl). Change the date of the circa-1850 Zurich transition from 1849-09-12 to 1853-07-16, overriding Shanks with data from Messerli about postal and telegraph time in Switzerland. Changes affecting time zone abbreviations before 1970 For Asia/Jakarta, use BMT (not JMT) for mean time from 1923 to 1932, as Jakarta was called Batavia back then. Changes affecting API The 'zic' command now outputs a dummy transition when far-future data can't be summarized using a TZ string, and uses a 402-year window rather than a 400-year window. For the current data, this affects only the Asia/Tehran file. It does not affect any of the time stamps that this file represents, so zdump outputs the same information as before. (Thanks to Andrew Main (Zefram).) The 'date' command has a new '-r' option, which lets you specify the integer time to display, a la FreeBSD. The 'tzselect' command has two new options '-c' and '-n', which lets you select a zone based on latitude and longitude. The 'zic' command's '-v' option now warns about constructs that require the new version-3 binary file format. (Thanks to Arthur David Olson for the suggestion.) Support for floating-point time_t has been removed. It was always dicey, and POSIX no longer requires it. (Thanks to Eric Blake for suggesting to the POSIX committee to remove it, and thanks to Alan Barrett, Clive D.W. Feather, Andy Heninger, Arthur David Olson, and Alois Treindl, for reporting bugs and elucidating some of the corners of the old floating-point implementation.) The signatures of 'offtime', 'timeoff', and 'gtime' have been changed back to the old practice of using 'long' to represent UT offsets. This had been inadvertently and mistakenly changed to 'int_fast32_t'. (Thanks to Christos Zoulos.) The code avoids undefined behavior on integer overflow in some more places, including gmtime, localtime, mktime and zdump. Changes affecting the zdump utility zdump now outputs "UT" when referring to Universal Time, not "UTC". "UTC" does not make sense for time stamps that predate the introduction of UTC, whereas "UT", a more-generic term, does. (Thanks to Steve Allen for clarifying UT vs UTC.) Data changes affecting behavior of tzselect and similar programs Country code BQ is now called the more-common name "Caribbean Netherlands" rather than the more-official "Bonaire, St Eustatius & Saba". Remove from zone.tab the names America/Montreal, America/Shiprock, and Antarctica/South_Pole, as they are equivalent to existing same-country-code zones for post-1970 time stamps. The data for these names are unchanged, so the names continue to work as before. Changes affecting code internals zic -c now runs way faster on 64-bit hosts when given large numbers. zic now uses vfprintf to avoid allocating and freeing some memory. tzselect now computes the list of continents from the data, rather than have it hard-coded. Minor changes pacify GCC 4.7.3 and GCC 4.8.1. Changes affecting the build procedure The 'leapseconds' file is now generated automatically from a new file 'leap-seconds.list', which is a copy of <ftp://time.nist.gov/pub/leap-seconds.list>. A new source file 'leapseconds.awk' implements this. The goal is simplification of the future maintenance of 'leapseconds'. When building the 'posix' or 'right' subdirectories, if the subdirectory would be a copy of the default subdirectory, it is now made a symbolic link if that is supported. This saves about 2 MB of file system space. The links America/Shiprock and Antarctica/South_Pole have been moved to the 'backward' file. This affects only nondefault builds that omit 'backward'. Changes affecting version-control only .gitignore now ignores 'date'. Changes affecting documentation and commentary Changes to the 'tzfile' man page It now mentions that the binary file format may be extended in future versions by appending data. It now refers to the 'zdump' and 'zic' man pages. Changes to the 'zic' man page It lists conditions that elicit a warning with '-v'. It says that the behavior is unspecified when duplicate names are given, or if the source of one link is the target of another. Its examples are updated to match the latest data. The definition of white space has been clarified slightly. (Thanks to Michael Deckers.) Changes to the 'Theory' file There is a new section about the accuracy of the tz database, describing the many ways that errors can creep in, and explaining why so many of the pre-1970 time stamps are wrong or misleading (thanks to Steve Allen, Lester Caine, and Garrett Wollman for discussions that contributed to this). The 'Theory' file describes LMT better (this follows a suggestion by Guy Harris). It refers to the 2013 edition of POSIX rather than the 2004 edition. It's mentioned that excluding 'backward' should not affect the other data, and it suggests at least one zone.tab name per inhabited country (thanks to Stephen Colebourne). Some longstanding restrictions on names are documented, e.g., 'America/New_York' precludes 'America/New_York/Bronx'. It gives more reasons for the 1970 cutoff. It now mentions which time_t variants are supported, such as signed integer time_t. (Thanks to Paul Goyette for reporting typos in an experimental version of this change.) (Thanks to Philip Newton for correcting typos in these changes.) Documentation and commentary is more careful to distinguish UT in general from UTC in particular. (Thanks to Steve Allen.) Add a better source for the Zurich 1894 transition. (Thanks to Pierre-Yves Berger.) Update shapefile citations in tz-link.htm. (Thanks to Guy Harris.) Here are links to the release files: ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/releases/tzcode2013e.tar.gz ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/releases/tzdata2013e.tar.gz The files are also available via HTTP as follows: http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/releases/tzcode2013e.tar.gz http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/releases/tzdata2013e.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 db6270a00d1a364865f3080ac41d8d6d42f5c833 dated Thu Sep 19 23:50:04 2013 -0700 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 v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAABAgAGBQJSO/DcAAoJEO2X6Q5iqn40rbIQAJcRAifvpdyKii++x7uB3JEd zYLCM9U2AkQXySjr6f4LYyPM7gEj9VvXRI4Ux3ZZ1tfxKW4dIJwjGjqjPIug/zmz khc0yJvrlUukCd9rDQZR+LRHNLPeUsSaSnC/5iM8UuzYIV4PYJLyI1+yob/4X6wq 9ompg+Fm/0jNHIh35ICq5QsCdIBMJxAN2QMwp5v3cbcmOKQQHrrGW89K4jlkzfL5 GGm+oWaodSSTIprPi7qBzGFk4G84aXqKl7Da2cXKzcVd70jvmoHWEiy2J0qdqhh8 N6GxJJ6X9mtj+Cuau9mmiBmtxynANcSKVbVFLUmIOroCl2V9RYhyDmjzd0Nk7oew v5ZGH1sTjFjPZ4bACYENLOZLVW4K32cpH8DBG47gnj9yhU5iDdAn/TwixMrZ6dSE m2xNuK9aLMCzoS6dFJJMHut0ojeuqq2zuDR4OmSsh2fZDBgBWcKVDdAcNNdDdD2G 5/aoWR1FPxYApkOhGlnsAZzuugxJbVA69kcWTDy/UoIui1Ozv3i8OabcUjvoU0fD +umoLz7LaWFdgKT7RW17fkxIpUpikYdLxx/cBQ9mnl9BsBid+BhO2V+UEDt1w1nv CG5qgjmcpFdTyzMXyDJ2c0snLh2X416+tOqOq3n8vJDlU35bPLlTVyQ4wGhZKOSn PzbV+Idmr7mbTdECKs4h =QOEp -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAABAgAGBQJSO/DnAAoJEO2X6Q5iqn40IeYP/Rgv723SYqXyKxcdJ3uRKDVI KciMh2X0OZqEyOiS9Vq2m7Fvt/Xp+H++NWyvTimBI+vhbiHHM92x3r27qvTqPmED T2+S4vcCnIXkXGODcqyum8pY2HO0oJC6VJ+/7WnJ7U/9zWHDq/cENuQ4SnulY+dS 9b/tcUePWRHJmMBB+SqQD8yFclH8C1LN5VRbh+6wAq5rgG23+Bzqe2cq1OXKxNc7 Z0i5JfMSSIEW6qIHjKLDIdygx7upSRjP2K+xYPjyTzszxmUZ0FEZhV9ZG2/6eNJe sHXg0aXCTL3dgd1h91hQiN8CNLLv3JNx7livFD+OTTgPyh3AqE2yHBODjLg0OzYG zFXryq1/bsFvJDqtDGs1BlBQYDuklaYpaCOOcbXnZMRwrgg8mD533qirSwr5Jxb3 XZtoG0u+yFOXb7N/ARcUVjbAG1ypfKFV4CZ1BlDbXlQNmr/5Cqpw5igAgjmuV+Ol E8ZpYXB3X9eJxfNhVLtjXWTfSoQfvMi2RNG2iv0x8/PdqLFnO2mxy8PwI3JkuJX/ Y2zJzZCIIjJCkAinzJy45WUJGDNVnicUViJ+W9TStfKXhxvidiXGmQdh3TsyH5Kx bdg3ZVHkWT19T5Pl/+7Rfqn5YO11/V3RvwGLD1mznRqhXJhosi/mp2dQCTRqqw3A sl/rxtJJWY8fy6sCc052 =kyxK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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McMurdo/South Pole
by Stephen Colebourne Sept. 23, 2013

Sept. 23, 2013

Since McMurdo was not founded until 16 Feb 1956 (wikipedia), I think that it is simply incorrect data to assign any time-zone transitions until that date. There simply were no DST transitions in McMurdo in the 1930s as it did not exist. https://github.com/jodastephen/tzdiff/commit/57aac13605f184a46f74d22f7dddc9… This is a a case where an ID that has existed for a long time with reasonably good data that has now been degraded through a Zone to Link conversion. Stephen (I hadn't realised the extent of the data pollution of McMurdo until I did my recent data analysis)

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Deep Impact: worng time zone?
by Arthur David Olson Sept. 23, 2013

Sept. 23, 2013

"...analysis has uncovered a potential problem with computer time tagging..." "NASA's Deep Space Comet Hunter Mission Comes to an End" http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-287 --ado

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A New Rule? (was McMurdo/South Pole)
by Bill Seymour Sept. 22, 2013

Sept. 22, 2013

A partly-baked idea to solve the more general problem of when zones appear and disappear: would it make sense to have another kind of entry in the zone RULES column to indicate that we should now follow another zone's practice? How about the keyword, Zone, a space, and the name of the other zone, with the next column following whitespace, if present, being the [UNTIL] column?

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Re: [tz] draft of change summary for next tz release
by David Patte ₯ Sept. 21, 2013

Sept. 21, 2013

And some of us prefer having at least one zone for each ISO 3166-1 country. Several of us understood the old theory file to require this. 1970 is an arbitrary computer geek cutoff point, with not much meaning to general time zone history.

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Jordan permanently on UTC+3?
by Paul Eggert Sept. 20, 2013

Sept. 20, 2013

I looked for hints about what Jordan's going to do with its clocks next month, and found this article from February: Cancelling winter saved Jordan $7 million Petra News Agency 2013-02-20 11:34 UTC http://www.albawaba.com/business/jordan-winter-electricity--472005 Currently the tz database is guessing that Jordan will revert to UTC+2 next month, but if this article is any indication they'll stay at UTC+3 indefinitely, which means the obvious tz patch (already mentioned in the 2012-10-15 comments) would be appropriate.

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Tocantins in Brazil probably not observing DST this season
by Steffen Thorsen Sept. 20, 2013

Sept. 20, 2013

According to this article, Tocantins in Brazil is very likely not to observe DST from October. The decree has not yet been issued, so the decision may still be revoked, but we assume it is very likely because it has been announced by the congressman and DST is so unpopular there. http://conexaoto.com.br/2013/09/18/ministerio-confirma-que-tocantins-esta-f… We will keep this article updated when this is confirmed: http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/brazil-starts-dst-2013.html Best regards, Steffen Thorsen - timeanddate.com

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