Hi Paul, Thank you for your reply; I have included a few people in cc that are involved with the TimeZone database on the TomTom side. We do not have a reliable source on the Xinjiang timezone so it is probably best to keep it the way it is now. My remark was based on: "While you are visiting Xinjiang, it is important to be aware of the time zone being used. Although officially run on Beijing time, Xinjiang people also use their own system. If Beijing time is used it means that the sun doesn't raise until 9am and it is still light at midnight in the summer months." (from http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/xinjiang/)
From an internal discussion: "Our TomTom navigation engine uses the zoneinfo library and it doesn't have a record with a "Beijing" city name. We can add it ourselves, but we need to be aware that if we add "Asia/Beijing", we no longer use the official time zone name from zoneinfo and we can't use the zoneinfo lib anymore to find out time zone information from time zone name."
This is the main reason we would like to ask whether it is possible to add a Asia/Beijing entry to the database. Probably TZ='Asia/Beijing' will not work for us as we only use what is in the database. Best regards, Walter Korte -----Original Message----- From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU] Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 1:27 AM To: Walter Korte Cc: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: Re: FW: About China time zones
From: Walter Korte [mailto:Walter.Korte@tomtom.com] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:15
Neither Harbin, Shanghai nor Chungking (this is a very strange spelling, it is spelled Chongqing in Pinyin) is used in China to indicate a time zone.
This is the same as the US. People in the US also do not say "Denver" or "Chicago" to denote a time zone. City names like "Denver" (and "Harbin") are needed only for proper support of older time stamps, back when different regions of the country used different rules. China is similar. If users don't care about old time stamps, they can simply set TZ='Asia/Beijing'.
in practice Xinjiang uses its own time zone so keeping these would be better.
Ouch. The time zone database says that Xinjiang currently uses the same time zone as Beijing in practice. So anyone who sets TZ='Asia/Urumqi' will get Beijing time for current time stamps. Do you know of a reliable source on this topic?