- tz - lists.iana.org

Theory - proposal to delete the reference to population
by Tobias Conradi May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012

References to population in tzcode2012b/Theory 1) "However, uninhabited ISO 3166 regions like Bouvet Island do not need locations, since local time is not defined there." 2) "Use UTC (with time zone abbreviation "zzz") for locations while uninhabited." ------- 1a) http://wikitravel.org/en/Bouvet_Island reports Olav Peak exists on Bouvet Island, without discussing a need for the peak. It is out of the scope of the tzdb as defined in the Theory file to decide on whether regions need locations. 1b) there is no definition of "uninhabited" German WP reports a team of people has been there after the 1970-01-01 cutoff point: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvetinsel#cite_note-6 "Vom 24. Dezember 1978 bis zum 8. März 1979 hielt sich ein norwegisches Forschungsteam auf der Insel auf und führte biologische und geologische Forschungsarbeiten durch." There are more sources supporting the claim that it had been populated. 1c) There is no evidence that local time is not defined if a population is absent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukon-Koyukuk_Census_Area,_Alaska is mostly uninhabited but the whole area is observing UTC-09:00 according to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timezoneswest.PNG maybe covered by America/Anchorage Alaska Time but no further geographic description found HM as no zone, but http://www.timegenie.com/country.time/hm "To ensure accuracy of information, timegenie.com contacted the Australian Antarctic Division [http://www.antarctica.gov.au/] . On January 3, 2005, a senior official confirmed that Heard Island and McDonald Islands are UTC/GMT +5 hours." 2a) A location changes its UTC offset when people move out or in? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chamberlin_(Alaska) on UTC most of the year? A ship landing on an island, changes the UTC offset observed on that island? The time a meteorite lands on island depends on whether people have been there or not? 1+2) Violate tzcode2012b/Theory: ----- Scope of the tz database ----- The tz database attempts to record the history and predicted future of all computer-based clocks that track civil time. To represent this data, the world is partitioned into regions whose clocks all agree about time stamps that occur after the somewhat-arbitrary cutoff point of the POSIX Epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC). 1+2) Are inconsistently applied. Uninhabited locations are treated differently, depending on whether they are located in countries that have been inhabited during all time between 1970-01-01 and 2012-05-12 or not. If Bouvet Island would be part of TF, it could be included in a zone but since it is covered by BV it is not. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Theory - typo - simplifes -> simplyfies
by Tobias Conradi May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012

tzcode2012b/Theory Indicate to humans as to where that region is. This simplifes use. simplifes -> simplyfies -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Infrastructure - ftp timestamps for .gz not showing creation time
by Tobias Conradi May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012

ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/releases/ failing to show the timestamps for archive creation time, showing 2011-10-13 00:00:00 instead until release of tzcode2011i.tar.gz and tzdata2011m.tar.gz inclusive. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com/

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Terminology mismatch in tzcode file format manpage / header
by Andrew Paprocki May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012

The file format is described with these fields: .I tzh_ttisgmtcnt The number of UTC/local indicators stored in the file. .I tzh_ttisgmtcnt UTC/local indicators, each stored as a one-byte value; they tell whether the transition times associated with local time types were specified as UTC or local time, and are used when a time zone file is used in handling POSIX-style time zone environment variables. A number of variables in localtime.c, tzfile.h, and zic.c dealing with these fields have variations of this "isgmt" substring. This presents a naming conflict because technically GMT and UTC are two different things. I find the inconsistent naming creeping into functions which deal with the file format. I would like to prevent variations of the string "GMT" from winding up in API names since the definition of the field refers to UTC. I propose wholesale replacing of the "isgmt" substring in tzcode files with "isutc" so that the file format fields are named consistently with their definition. If absolutely necessary, a #define can be used in tzfile.h so that code referencing tzh_ttisgmtcnt will still compile. -Andrew

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Paul Eggert Confirmed by the IESG as the Time Zone Coordinator
by IETF Chair May 17, 2012

May 17, 2012

Dear TZ Community: I was just informed that the confirmation of Paul Eggert as the Time Zone Coordinator was never announced to this mail list. I am forwarding this note from the IESG Secretary to let everyone know that this happened over a month ago. Sorry for the announcement oversight. On behalf of the IESG, Russ Housley > From: IESG Secretary <iesg-secretary(a)ietf.org> > Date: April 13, 2012 4:15:36 PM EDT > To: iana(a)iana.org > Cc: iesg(a)ietf.org > Subject: Time Zone Coordinator > > IANA: > > The IESG has approved Paul Eggert (eggert(a)cs.ucla.edu) as the new Time Zone coordinator. > > Best regards, > IESG Secretary

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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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