On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 03:33, Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com> wrote:
So perhaps there's an opportunity here to help everyone out by trying to promulgate a vocabulary which emphasizes the arbitrariness. Instead of having a "dst" flag which is either true or false, what if we had a "kind" field which was a small integer from 0 to N-1? (Of course, internal to tz files, that's exactly what we have already.)
In effect, tzdb used to provide (0, 1) for Ireland, now it provides (1, 0). This was an incompatible API change for the downstream projects of Java and CLDR. Everything else about the rationale of the change and the meaning of that data is in many ways not that important. Your broader point that an extended/clearer id/flag might be useful is indeed one way out of the mess. What I argued up-thread was that tzdb could provide multiple pieces of information - legal dst or not, and base vs advanced - with the potential to also mark Ramadan type situations with a different code. But to do so would, IMO probably need a significant extension to the file format. Stephen