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Australian time zone abbreviations
by Shaun Bouckaert Nov. 6, 2011

Nov. 6, 2011

Having long been irked by the fact that the abbreviation for Brisbane is EST, as opposed to AEST, I read through the time zone data file and found that the reason for this was a discussion back in 2001. I'm not sure if this existed then, but there is a federal government web page that lists the time zones and their abbreviations. http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/time ================================================================================ Time zones With a land mass close to 7.7 million square kilometres, Australia is the world’s sixth largest country and is divided into three separate time zones. Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) Covers the eastern states of Queensland, New South Wales (with the exception of the town of Broken Hill), Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. AEST is equal to Coordinated Universal Time plus 10 hours (UTC +10). Australian Central Standard Time (ACST) Covers the state of South Australia, the town of Broken Hill in western New South Wales and the Northern Territory. ACST is equal to Coordinated Universal Time plus 9 ½ hours (UTC +9 ½). Australian Western Standard Time (AWST) Covers Western Australia. AWST is equal to Coordinated Universal Time plus 8 hours (UTC +8). Daylight saving Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the practice of advancing clocks one hour during the warmer months of the year. In Australia, Daylight saving is observed in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and the Australian Capital Territory. Daylight Saving Time begins at 2am (AEST) on the first Sunday in October and ends at 2am (AEST) (which is 3am Australian Eastern Daylight Time) on the first Sunday in April. Where Daylight saving is observed: NSW, ACT,Vic and Tas move from AEST to Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT), and clocks are advanced to UTC +11. SA and the NSW town of Broken Hill move from ACST to Australian Central Daylight Time (ACDT), and clocks are advanced to UTC +10 ½. Daylight saving is not observed in Queensland, the Northern Territory or Western Australia. ================================================================================ I believe that the abbreviations used on the federal government website should be used. Shaun Bouckaert

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leap seconds (srsly)
by Zefram Nov. 4, 2011

Nov. 4, 2011

In a couple of months, a decision is going to be made about possibly ceasing leap seconds in UTC. If that happens, the tz database is going to be thrown into a world of hurt, as "UTC = GMT" gradually ceases to be a viable approximation. Here are the slides from a talk presented a couple of months ago that provides a useful primer on how the decision would interact with civil and legal time: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/program/presentations/AAS_11-662_Se… All the presentations from the conference where that was presented, discussing mary aspects of the decision, can be found here: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/program/ (Information forwarded from the leapsecs mailing list.) -zefram

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Leap seconds
by Thom Hehl Nov. 4, 2011

Nov. 4, 2011

The docs specify that the transition time is based on the return value from the time() function. Does that mean that the leap seconds are automatically adjusted based on that value and the transition time is correct or does that mean that it uses the actual time and I have to adjust first with leap seconds if I want an accurate conversion?

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Thread-safe localtime(3) (was Re: Reading binary files)
by Bennett Todd Nov. 3, 2011

Nov. 3, 2011

Am I missing a fundamental, or would it be reasonable to not necessarily expose the data structure for the parsed conversion data, but instead offer explicit parse routine (returning an opaque blob) and convert routine that takes such a blob as a parameter? Then it should be easy to make tzset(3) utterly trivial -- call the zoninfo parser on getenv(TZ) with locking, and localtime(3) likewise trivial, call the real convert routine with the datastructure cached by the latest tzset.

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Re: [tz] Reading binary files
by Thom Hehl Nov. 2, 2011

Nov. 2, 2011

Not if you are writing applications that need high performance processing of multiple timezones and access from multiple languages and platforms. Besides, we're multi-threaded. Changing environment variables is simply not an option. Yikes! Can you say race condition. From: bent(a)latency.net [mailto:bent@latency.net] On Behalf Of Bennett Todd Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 9:09 AM To: Thom Hehl Subject: Re: [tz] Reading binary files The binary files are a distraction. What you want to do is set the environment variable TZ to the name of the zone you want, then call tzset which is what consults the database and prepares for conversion. Then localtime(3) will translate a time_t (seconds since the epoch) to hours, minutes, seconds, etc in the local timezone. For translating back and forth you repeatedly reset TZ, call tzset(3), and localtime(3). Those are the standards for Unix, the native home of the zoneinfo database. If you're on a different system details may vary. But on Unix the database is probably already installed in your system and the subroutines you need are already compiled into the system library.

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tzdata2011n.tar.gz
by Robert Elz Nov. 2, 2011

Nov. 2, 2011

The file ftp://munnari.oz.au/pub/tzdata2011n.tar.gz ...is now available; this reflects changes circulated last week, and weekend, on the time zone mailing list, and summarised here. There are three changes of note - most urgently, Cuba (America/Havana) has extended summer time by two weeks, now to end on Nov 13, rather than the (already past) Oct 30. Second, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Europe/Tiraspol) decided not to split from the rest of Moldova after all, and consequently that zone has been removed (again) and reinstated in the "backward" file as a link to Europe/Chisinau. And third, the end date for Fiji's summer time this summer was moved forward from the earlier planned Feb 26, to Jan 22. Apart from that, Moldova (MD) returns to a single entry in zone.tab (and the incorrect syntax that was in the 2011m version of that file is so fixed - it woudl have been fixed in a different way had this change not happened - that's the "missing" sccs version id). Once again, no signatures, but hash digests using several different algorithms are appended to this message so you can verify the file that you fetch. These were generated using the pkgtools/digest program from NetBSD's pkgsrc. kre MD5 (tzdata2011n.tar.gz) = 20dbfb28efa008ddbf6dd34601ea40fa RMD160 (tzdata2011n.tar.gz) = 4a2a06ada05aca1ea99767caa1b23c6fcb88bcd3 SHA1 (tzdata2011n.tar.gz) = 5435fae9844dc89f9d418aa956e161e23d1babdf SHA512 (tzdata2011n.tar.gz) = 2081fa44f00ace6539ecc1296f454fb96bb4afa61114ffbc58f46f82ef8ba2cfa22d7e48456a293502433dccca6d921db8f70d6c6e18a074996cfeb74534d2df TIGER (tzdata2011n.tar.gz) = 28b009b1e0e7126c2430270efd1aae89237be7c00b3ad2a5 WHIRLPOOL (tzdata2011n.tar.gz) = e7004894829c63baef91fd5fbc14b77a7fbd92ae2a6e001f279c8b1169bd5be009ae07af336ddaca148eadeba3383896b247a19c9e72d894e80ad60fc896f3f3

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Query about update in timezone database
by Mangala Arjun Nov. 2, 2011

Nov. 2, 2011

Hi, I am new member to this mailing list. When an update for timezone database is present , will it be intimated in this mailing list ? Thanks and Regards Mangala Arjun

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Rule Russia incorrect
by Konstantin Kivi Nov. 2, 2011

Nov. 2, 2011

Time Zone Data v. 2011m (Released 24 October 2011) file contains a line ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rule Russia 1993 2010 - Mar lastSun 2:00s 1:00 S ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- which I believe means that last change to summer time was in 2010. This is incorrect, because this (2011) year we actually have changed time on last Sunday of March (by moving clock forward) I believe that for historical purposes the rule must looks as follows ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rule Russia 1993 2011 - Mar lastSun 2:00s 1:00 S ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the other hand Rule --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rule Russia 1996 2010 - Oct lastSun 2:00s 0 - ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- is correct, because Russia stopped using Daylight Savings Time switching because of a federal law "On calculation of time" signed by President Dmitry Medvedev on June 9, 2011 -- Sincerely yours, Konstantin Kivi <konst(a)sirena2000.ru> IT Director, Comtech-N JSC Moscow, Russia, +7-495-941-60-02

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Re: [tz] Sydney, Australia (and other places) DST indication (or lack thereof)
by Willy＠willylorenzo.com Nov. 1, 2011

Nov. 1, 2011

I appreciate the info. Several of the links given in the Australasia file are broken, which, of course, makes it impossible to review the referenced source, but I can see that this is a muddled subject. The only suggestion I would make is that if the "S" in EST is referring to both "standard" and "summer", then the FORMAT should be EST/EST...and maybe a "# (S)tandard/(S)ummer" comment added. At the very least it clearly indicates the decision that's been made for daylight saving time representation. As to what it should be...I'll leave that to the Australians (oh wait...isn't that the problem to begin with?) ;) On Mon Oct 31 12:55:06 2011 "Bill Tiede" <billt(a)chaossoftware.com> wrote: > For WorldTimeServer.com at least, we used two government sources for our time zone abbreviations for Australia: > > 1. Australia.gov.au at http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/time > > 2. Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/daysavtm.shtml > > There has been plenty of discussion in the past about how official these abbreviations are or how widely accepted within Australia these are, so keep in mind I'm not trying to reopen debate or anything, just responding to the question about where we got the idea to call it what we have. > > Best Regards, > Bill Tiede > > www.ChaosSoftware.com; www.WorldTimeServer.com

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Auto Reply: Re: Rule Russia incorrect
by gunther.vermeir＠oracle.com Oct. 31, 2011

Oct. 31, 2011

Hello, I'm back on monday 14 November and will have no access to email until then. I will reply when i'm back. Please contact the duty manager if needed. regards, Gunther

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