- tz - lists.iana.org

Pulling the data apart ...
by Lester Caine Sept. 16, 2013

Sept. 16, 2013

Paul ... I've started on phase two which is extracting the data, but I'm falling at the first hurdle. Should there be a tab character between 'Zone' and the name? I've found many entries in the africa file which don't and it is messing up my 'csv' splitter. Just need a special rule when 'Zone' is found, but looks a little inconsistent with respect to the following lines? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk

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[PATCH 1/3] * tzfile.5 (SEE ALSO): Mention zdump(8), zic(8).
by Paul Eggert Sept. 16, 2013

Sept. 16, 2013

--- tzfile.5 | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/tzfile.5 b/tzfile.5 index 4089910..69b9e8b 100644 --- a/tzfile.5 +++ b/tzfile.5 @@ -151,6 +151,6 @@ between daylight saving and standard time. .PP Future changes to the format may append more data. .SH SEE ALSO -newctime(3), newtzset(3) +newctime(3), newtzset(3), zdump(8), zic(8) .\" This file is in the public domain, so clarified as of .\" 1996-06-05 by Arthur David Olson. -- 1.8.3.1

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Deputies of the Russian Duma introduced a bill to switch to "winter time" in Russia
by Alexander Krivenyshev Sept. 15, 2013

Sept. 15, 2013

Once again, Deputies of the Russian State Duma (Ivan Melnikov and Oleg Smolin) have attempted to introduce a bill concerning the switch to "winter time" in Russia. The bill proposes that Russia return to winter time on Oct. 27, 2013 and reinstate the original 11 time zones. original document (in Russian) (http://asozd2c.duma.gov.ru/addwork/scans.nsf/ID/53CA0EEFC86797C443257BDE004 C0BE9/$FILE/339386-6.PDF?OpenElement) http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_russia56.html Alexander Krivenyshev, http://www.WorldTimeZone.com

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TAI as a time zone?
by DataPacRat Sept. 15, 2013

Sept. 15, 2013

Would it be feasible to include International Atomic Time (TAI) and/or GPS time (which differs from TAI by a fixed number of seconds) in the tz database as a time zone separate from UTC? I ask because I'm getting ready to submit at least one calendar to BCP 47 which is based on the leap-second-free TAI, and from the feedback I've gotten so far, it seems that the most widely-acceptable way to deal with the differences between TAI and UTC is to employ the tz database, if it's possible to do so. -- Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat

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Question about leap seconds
by random832＠fastmail.us Sept. 12, 2013

Sept. 12, 2013

Two things: Can a transition time ever reasonably fall _on_ a leap second, and can the zic input format represent this case? I am sketching out a design for a new time zone file format, and it occurs to me that it might be a good idea to specify transitions with POSIX timestamps so the data regarding one time zone is independent of whether leap seconds are enabled or not.

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Re: [tz] Using MediaWiki / Wikidata
by Lester Caine Sept. 12, 2013

Sept. 12, 2013

Tobias Conradi wrote: > was: Re: [tz] [PATCH 3/3] * europe (Europe/Vaduz): Now a link to Europe/Zurich. > > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 7:29 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert(a)cs.ucla.edu> wrote: >> It may well make sense to organize what is currently tz commentary >> into something that is, well, a bit more organized. The format >> I'm most familiar with is MediaWiki, for what it's worth. > And here is some infrastructure using MediaWiki: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Tz_database > > E.g. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa/Luanda > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America/Indiana/Indianapolis > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia/Novosibirsk > > But there are vandalizing admins around, e.g. Anthony Bradbury: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Time+in+Africa > > Another option could be to use wikidata, e.g. > Asia/Novosibirsk > https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4806295 > and put evidences and for time offsets there. Personally I have no time for wikipedia since we had a lot of well written material removed in the past because some other editors decided they did not like it. So I have no confidence that any material posted would remain clean or even available. I think that a 'private' wiki is much more appropriate given that what we are going to archive is evidential material? With publicly accessible sandboxes for providing new material. Which is then managed based on it's suitability for inclusion? I could live with mediawiki format, but I much prefer clean html documents using ckeditor. And adding interactive packages is something I don't find particularly easy with those type of systems anyway. Is there somewhere appropriate to host a service Paul? I'm happy to run something on my servers, but I suspect the load may be quite high ;) -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk

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[PATCH 1/3] Fix off-by-one bug with Kingston Mean Time.
by Paul Eggert Sept. 12, 2013

Sept. 12, 2013

* northamerica (America/Cayman, America/Jamaica, America/Grand_Turk): Change KMT from -5:07:12 to -5:07:11 (should be -5:07:10.41). * zone.tab: Fine-tune geographical coordinates to match -5:07:10.41. I chose the latitude to match the General Post Office, Kingston, in the city center according to Google Maps. --- northamerica | 19 +++++++------------ zone.tab | 2 +- 2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-) diff --git a/northamerica b/northamerica index 3a572ba..55755dd 100644 --- a/northamerica +++ b/northamerica @@ -2622,7 +2622,7 @@ Zone Atlantic/Bermuda -4:19:18 - LMT 1930 Jan 1 2:00 # Hamilton # Cayman Is # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone America/Cayman -5:25:32 - LMT 1890 # Georgetown - -5:07:12 - KMT 1912 Feb # Kingston Mean Time + -5:07:11 - KMT 1912 Feb # Kingston Mean Time -5:00 - EST # Costa Rica @@ -3067,17 +3067,12 @@ Zone America/Tegucigalpa -5:48:52 - LMT 1921 Apr # Great Swan I ceded by US to Honduras in 1972 # Jamaica - -# From Bob Devine (1988-01-28): -# Follows US rules. - -# From U. S. Naval Observatory (1989-01-19): -# JAMAICA 5 H BEHIND UTC - -# From Shanks & Pottenger: +# Shanks & Pottenger give -5:07:12, but Milne records -5:07:10.41 from an +# unspecified official document, and says "This time is used throughout the +# island". Go with Milne. Round to the nearest second as required by zic. # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] -Zone America/Jamaica -5:07:12 - LMT 1890 # Kingston - -5:07:12 - KMT 1912 Feb # Kingston Mean Time +Zone America/Jamaica -5:07:11 - LMT 1890 # Kingston + -5:07:11 - KMT 1912 Feb # Kingston Mean Time -5:00 - EST 1974 Apr 28 2:00 -5:00 US E%sT 1984 -5:00 - EST @@ -3217,7 +3212,7 @@ Rule TC 2007 max - Mar Sun>=8 2:00 1:00 D Rule TC 2007 max - Nov Sun>=1 2:00 0 S # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone America/Grand_Turk -4:44:32 - LMT 1890 - -5:07:12 - KMT 1912 Feb # Kingston Mean Time + -5:07:11 - KMT 1912 Feb # Kingston Mean Time -5:00 TC E%sT # British Virgin Is diff --git a/zone.tab b/zone.tab index 769432b..7d4c575 100644 --- a/zone.tab +++ b/zone.tab @@ -233,7 +233,7 @@ IR +3540+05126 Asia/Tehran IS +6409-02151 Atlantic/Reykjavik IT +4154+01229 Europe/Rome JE +4912-00207 Europe/Jersey -JM +1800-07648 America/Jamaica +JM +175805-0764736 America/Jamaica JO +3157+03556 Asia/Amman JP +353916+1394441 Asia/Tokyo KE -0117+03649 Africa/Nairobi -- 1.8.3.1

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Re: [tz] uniform time in Switzerland in second half of 19th century
by Paul Eggert Sept. 12, 2013

Sept. 12, 2013

Pierre-Yves Berger found some documentary evidence of the 1894 transition in Switzerland, and I got my hands on a copy of Messerli's book, which gives more details about the circa-1855 transition. Here's a patch, which I'll push to the experimental repository. As far as data goes, this merely moves the 1855 transition to 1853-07-16. >From 9805c5c4a38750ff0c2345fdcc2a273357153259 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Paul Eggert <eggert(a)cs.ucla.edu> Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:28:36 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] * europe, zic.8 (Europe/Zurich): Change transition to 1853-07-16. Explain how I derived this guess from Messerli's book. Also, give better evidence about the 1894 transition, from Pierre-Yves Berger. --- europe | 39 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----------- zic.8 | 6 +++--- 2 files changed, 31 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-) diff --git a/europe b/europe index 8d26b4e..e70cfb4 100644 --- a/europe +++ b/europe @@ -2662,23 +2662,40 @@ Zone Europe/Stockholm 1:12:12 - LMT 1879 Jan 1 # ... the meridian for Bern mean time ... is 7 degrees 26'22.50". # Expressed in time, it is 0h29m45.5s. +# From Pierre-Yves Berger (2013-09-11): +# the "Circulaire du conseil federal" (December 11 1893) +# <http://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/viewOrigDoc.do?id=10071353> ... +# clearly states that the [1894-06-01] change should be done at midnight +# but if no one is present after 11 at night, could be postponed until one +# hour before the beginning of service. + # From Paul Eggert (2013-09-11): -# Round to the nearest even second, 0:29:46. -# -# We can find no reliable source for Shanks's claim that all of Switzerland -# except Geneva switched to Bern Mean Time at 00:00 on 1848-09-12. On the -# contrary, a more-reliable source talks about "the gradual introduction of a -# national time (from the 1850s)" (Google translation) with a switch to CET in -# 1894; see Speich's review of Messerli's thesis, Traverse 1997/3, 131-3 -# <http://www.tg.ethz.ch/dokumente/pdf_files/rez_messerli.pdf>. For now, model -# this messy process as a transition in 1855. Shanks's 1894 transition is more -# plausible for Zurich but has not been checked. +# Round BMT to the nearest even second, 0:29:46. +# +# We can find no reliable source for Shanks's assertion that all of Switzerland +# except Geneva switched to Bern Mean Time at 00:00 on 1848-09-12. This book: +# +# Jakob Messerli. Gleichmassig, punktlich, schnell: Zeiteinteilung und +# Zeitgebrauch in der Schweiz im 19. Jahrhundert. Chronos, Zurich 1995, +# ISBN 3-905311-68-2, OCLC 717570797. +# +# suggests that the transition was more gradual, and that the Swiss did not +# agree about civil time during the transition. The timekeeping it gives the +# most detail for is postal and telegraph time: here, federal legislation (the +# "Bundesgesetz uber die Erstellung von elektrischen Telegraphen") passed on +# 1851-11-23, and an official implementation notice was published 1853-07-16 +# (Bundesblatt 1853, Bd. II, S. 859). On p 72 Messerli writes that in +# practice since July 1853 Bernese time was used in "all postal and telegraph +# offices in Switzerland from Geneva to St. Gallen and Basel to Chiasso" +# (Google translation). For now, model this transition as occuring on +# 1853-07-16, though it probably occurred at some other date in Zurich, and +# legal civil time probably changed at still some other transition date. # Rule NAME FROM TO TYPE IN ON AT SAVE LETTER/S Rule Swiss 1941 1942 - May Mon>=1 1:00 1:00 S Rule Swiss 1941 1942 - Oct Mon>=1 2:00 0 - # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] -Zone Europe/Zurich 0:34:08 - LMT 1855 # See above comment. +Zone Europe/Zurich 0:34:08 - LMT 1853 Jul 16 # See above comment. 0:29:46 - BMT 1894 Jun # Bern Mean Time 1:00 Swiss CE%sT 1981 1:00 EU CE%sT diff --git a/zic.8 b/zic.8 index a2374a1..7ea94c5 100644 --- a/zic.8 +++ b/zic.8 @@ -468,7 +468,7 @@ Rule EU 1996 max - Oct lastSun 1:00u 0 - .sp .ta \w'# Zone\0\0'u +\w'Europe/Zurich\0\0'u +\w'GMTOFF\0\0'u +\w'RULES/SAVE\0\0'u +\w'FORMAT\0\0'u # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES/SAVE FORMAT UNTIL -Zone Europe/Zurich 0:34:08 - LMT 1855 +Zone Europe/Zurich 0:34:08 - LMT 1853 Jul 16 0:29:46 - BMT 1894 Jun 1:00 Swiss CE%sT 1981 1:00 EU CE%sT @@ -480,9 +480,9 @@ Link Europe/Zurich Switzerland In this example, the zone is named Europe/Zurich but it has an alias as Switzerland. This example says that Zurich was 34 minutes and 8 -seconds west of UT until 1855-01-01 at 00:00, when the legal offset +seconds west of UT until 1853-07-16 at 00:00, when the legal offset was changed to 7\(de\|26\(fm\|22.50\(sd; although this works out to -0:29.45.50, the input format cannot represent fractional seconds so it +0:29:45.50, the input format cannot represent fractional seconds so it is rounded here. After 1894-06-01 at 00:00 Swiss daylight saving rules (defined with lines beginning with "Rule Swiss") apply, and the UT offset became one hour. From 1981 to the present, EU daylight saving rules have -- 1.8.1.2

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Re: [tz] Getting close to new release: testing, testing, ... [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]
by Timothy Arceri Sept. 12, 2013

Sept. 12, 2013

Will you be including the updates to the Australian Daylight Saving's abbreviations in this release? http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-April/019099.html -----Original Message----- From: tz-bounces(a)iana.org [mailto:tz-bounces@iana.org] On Behalf Of Paul Eggert Sent: Wednesday, 11 September 2013 7:55 PM To: Time zone mailing list Subject: [tz] Getting close to new release: testing, testing, ... We need to release a new version soon, because of Fiji. I did further testing and it appears that the recent changes to add meta-information to the zic output won't fly, because they're incompatible with the GNU C library on Ubuntu 12.04. So we need to rethink that feature. There's no rush to introduce it, so let's omit it from the next release. Also, the -t option recently added to tzselect seems like it will be superseded by the tzwinnow approach, whenever we get that working and stable, so for now I think I'd rather omit this. There are a few other problems found by "make public", mostly links that were in the wrong files. I'll post proposed changes soon. If other people could do some testing that'd be nice. You can run "make public". The output should contain the following diagnostics: warning: "antarctica", line 318: Antarctica/Palmer: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps warning: "asia", line 1412: 24:00 not handled by pre-1998 versions of zic warning: "asia", line 2332: 24:00 not handled by pre-1998 versions of zic warning: "asia", line 1026: Asia/Jerusalem: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps (rule from "asia", line 1021) warning: "asia", line 1315: Asia/Amman: pre-1994 clients may mishandle distant timestamps warning: "asia", line 2016: Asia/Gaza: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps warning: "asia", line 2347: Asia/Hebron: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps warning: "australasia", line 269: Pacific/Fiji: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps warning: "europe", line 998: America/Godthab: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps warning: "southamerica", line 1141: America/Santiago: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps warning: "southamerica", line 1313: Pacific/Easter: pre-2013 clients may mishandle distant timestamps along with a very long section that starts as follows, which shows that the tz code is still broken on platforms with unsigned 32-bit time_t (this is a longstanding problem). checking uint32_t zones ... --- tzpublic/int64_t.out 2013-09-11 02:43:50.871343089 -0700 +++ tzpublic/uint32_t.out 2013-09-11 02:43:55.907343185 -0700 @@ -210,278 +210,6 @@ Europe/Andorra Sun Mar 29 01:00:00 2037 UT = Sun Mar 29 03:00:00 2037 CEST isdst=1 Europe/Andorra Sun Oct 25 00:59:59 2037 UT = Sun Oct 25 02:59:59 2037 CEST isdst=1 Europe/Andorra Sun Oct 25 01:00:00 2037 UT = Sun Oct 25 02:00:00 2037 CET isdst=0 -Europe/Andorra Sun Mar 28 00:59:59 2038 UT = Sun Mar 28 01:59:59 2038 CET isdst=0 -Europe/Andorra Sun Mar 28 01:00:00 2038 UT = Sun Mar 28 03:00:00 2038 CEST isdst=1 -Europe/Andorra Sun Oct 31 00:59:59 2038 UT = Sun Oct 31 02:59:59 2038 CEST isdst=1

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POSIX extension check
by Arthur David Olson Sept. 10, 2013

Sept. 10, 2013

It's probably worthwhile to check whether extended POSIX in zic-produced binaries will cause grief when those binaries are used with old versions of localtime.c. If so, one or more of documentation, a zic warning, or a version number bump may be in order. --ado

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