Robert, All this said Robert, your clarification is helpful, and I thank you for that. Architecturally, my picture of a Zone (transition), as an individual element/object/entity for any given period of time will have a fixed beginning and ending. The end is when the new transition starts or for lack of one, it ends here and now.
From that point of view, "max" is appropriate because for that entity (one with a fixed beginning and ending), the process of determining the transition via a given date, will discard the old object for the new one, making the previous "max" valid but for a transition that is no longer valid.
Consider the picture as it would look in 1999, before the PRC transition, [for Macau]. --- as of Nov 1999 --- Rule Macau 1978 1980 - Apr Sun>=15 0:00 1:00 S Rule Macau 1978 max - Oct Sun>=15 0:00 0 - # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone Asia/Macau 7:34:20 - LMT 1912 The word "max" would be entirely appropriate. By your current listing, when PRC became relevant, it was then necessary to remove the "max" and put in something else... say 1980. I would argue to leave it as it would have been at that time. The addition of the new transition would negate the effect of the "max" and there would be no need for a change at that time. Regards, Jamie -----Original Message----- From: kre@munnari.OZ.AU [mailto:kre@munnari.OZ.AU] Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 10:44 AM To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: Re: Macau Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:19:26 +0000 From: jrl <jrl@terraatlas.com> Message-ID: <E468A544C5BEF74DBF22CAAB3FD50DE810F48C13@UNIVERZ.terraatlas.local> | Meaning use the Macau rules until Dec 20, 1999 | There are no Macau Rules after October of 1980. Yes. | SO... in my mind it means we revert to the overall rule of the Zone No, no rules means no transitions, the time just continues forward (like the clock on your wall) without any strange jumps. Whenever the time jumps, we need a transition point, the rules say when those transition points appear. | If there are no rules, then revert back to the rule of the Zone. Where do you think the documentation says that? Because if there is somewhere, we need to fix it, because that's not how it works at all. The rules give the method for finding the transition points, when there is no transition point, time just moves forward, as time always has. | What doesn't make sense if why a set of Rules is used that ends prior | to the end of the period used by the zone. Because there was a period when there were transitions, and that period ended, the rules cover the period of transitions. | Perhaps a "max" in place of the 1980 would make this more clear. No, just the opposite. We use "max" when we have transitions that are continuing into the future, to some (as yet) undetermined future time. When we know when the transitions stopped occurring, we say so, that is what makes things clear. Once again, the point of the rules is to provide a method by which we calculate the points at which local wallclock time experiences a non-continuity, and that's it. Nothing else is reasonably possible, as these things are not necessarily nice nested "go forward and back" operations that could be expressed using other means. kre ps: you said "the time change ran ends on the Sunday before the 15th for the years 1978, 1979, and 1980" whereas the rule you quoted in the earlier mail was "the first sunday on or after the 15th" (Sun>=15) (a way of saying "the third sunday") - I assume the "before" in your message was just a typo/thinko.