On Mon, 14 Oct 2024 at 20:34, Doug Ewell via tz <
tz@iana.org> wrote:
So I think
> that the time change on 6 October 2024 should still be considered as
> DST according to the previous law, and permanently UTC-3 from 15
> October 2024 according to the new law. But in practice it doesn't
> matter.
Regardless of what the constitution or civil code says, it's a bit silly to imagine that a law could be passed to change what time it was in the past.
That's not what's at issue (though if it were, we would of course endeavor to describe whatever was observed de facto, rather than de jure). In this case, there is no dispute as to what time Paraguay has observed between 6 and 14 October 2024 (inclusive), and that is UTC-3. The only potential difference is the value of the obsolescent "isdst" bit and, as Heitor said, "in practice it doesn't matter":
For dates beginning with the 6 October 2024 forward clock shift but prior to the new law taking effect, we would typically have continued to model this as a standard offset of UTC-4 plus 1 hour of DST. For dates after the law takes effect, we generally model "permanent DST" instead as a standard offset of UTC-3 with no DST.
Paraguay is, of course, not actually shifting any clocks when the law officially takes effect (be that on 15 October or otherwise), because they already did that on 6 October under the old law. Meanwhile, the technical difference here between UTC-4+1 and UTC-3+0 is inconsequential to most. Since all timestamps between these dates are the same under both the old law and the new one, the intent of the new law could still be fully observed, just as it had been telegraphed.
While there is value in recording these exact details of the letter of the law, that value is mostly in our commentary. It may be overly confusing for us to encode a separate "isdst"-only "transition", as the new law had no practical effects which were affected by the few "extra" days it took to codify it. The actual wall-clock effects of the new law, which are our primary concern, won't happen until the night of 22/23 March 2025, when Paraguay will no longer "fall back" to UTC-4.