Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] wrote:
Why is there a rule for Oct 2008* if there is nothing officially known?
The rule reflects the sense that Argentina is likelier than not to observe DST, even though nothing is officially known. As indicated in the proposed change letter, there'll be a further update if Argentina does something different than what's now in the Rules.
So basically the current tzdata has a *guess* at when it *might* be. As you probably know, many operating systems had their time wrong last week because tzdata said DST would start on the 5th. Ubuntu took days to update the tzdata since the report. The current package says it will start on the 19th. If the government doesn't say *anything* about DST, what will you do? Change the rules on the 18th to remove the DST? Do you know how much time it will take for all distros to have it? Definitely more than a day, so on the 19th we'll have the same mess again.