One other piece of information to solicit from governments who switch to permanent DST: is the new scheme permanent daylight time, or does it establish a new standard time? (This can be of importance in dealing with laws or contracts written in terms of "standard time.") @dashdashado On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 5:22 PM Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@systematicsw.ab.ca> wrote:
We should also ask all government folks to provide web links to officially published acts, decrees, laws, orders, regulations, or statutes available online at a government web site, with the document providing full details including dates, times, and the zones in effect when any changes or transitions in time are to be made, plus any preferences as to normal English names or abbreviations, as well as the legally effective date (time, zone) of publication. These official document links avoid any possible later issues, should anyone dispute and solicit changes to the time keeping practice in effect at any location within that legal jurisdiction, as we are aware of both official and de facto variances in practices near many time zone boundaries.
On 2020-07-03 12:40, Tim Parenti wrote:
Thanks for keeping us in the loop, then. Since tz is used directly by many operating systems — Apple (including iOS), Google (including Android), and most Linux distributions — most day-to-day users should be good to go when the change is finalized, if they aren't already. For what it's worth, it seems Microsoft have also picked up on the change
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-time-zone/time-z... ,
though from the date of their announcement, it's possible they got the news from us. Other software which does not rely on the operating system's timezone definitions may require their own updates; those concerns are downstream from this project.
On Fri, 3 Jul 2020 at 14:31, Andrew Smith wrote: That is excellent to hear, Tim. Yes, I had known that some time services has interpreted our announcement as the ‘done and dusted’ finalization. At that point in March it was a policy commitment, and the news on that nuance was not totally clear. We just do have some legal process to finish off, which we are on track to do, so I don’t think we will end up in a tough spot. I will let you know when we make our change legally final so we can all rest assured that November 2 will still see us on UTC -7.
On July 3, 2020 11:24 AM, Tim Parenti wrote: We made this change in our codebase on 5 March 2020, based on 4 March CBC reporting and a government press release stating that Yukon would be remaining permanently on UTC-7 following its spring-forward transition on 8 March. As such, both America/Dawson and America/Whitehorse have been updated accordingly:
https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/e6c1f0e7daa0b6c5131b2976c6be9190845d2b49
(Canada/Yukon is a long-deprecated backwards-compatibility link to America/Whitehorse, so need not be updated separately.) This change is already included in our latest release, 2020a, which was published on 23 April 2020. Although it can sometimes take several weeks or months after publication for our releases to make it to downstream distributions and software updates for various computer and mobile platforms, many recent devices that are receiving regular updates should already have this change, and many more are likely to receive it before Yukon time diverges from our old predictions in November. One (hopefully small) point: Our understanding from the press release at https://yukon.ca/en/news/yukon-end-seasonal-time-change was that this decision was already finalized. If it is not, this is not a major issue, but do note that tz's current predictions published in 2020a do not have Yukon falling back on 1 November 2020… so if for some reason the regulatory processes should be delayed, please contact us as soon as that's apparent. On July 2, 2020 3:48 PM, Amanda Baber via RT wrote: Thank you for contacting us. IANA hosts the Time Zone Database, but the database is managed by the Time Zone Coordinator in conjunction with a mailing list. You can find find mailing list information here: https://www.iana.org/time-zones This document should have or point to much of the information you're looking for: https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tz-link.html As is noted at the link above, "If your government plans to change its time zone boundaries or daylight saving rules, inform tz@iana.org well in advance, as this will coordinate updates to many cell phones, computers, and other devices around the world. With less than a year's notice there is a good chance that some computer-based clocks will operate incorrectly after the change, due to delays in propagating updates to software and data. The shorter the notice, the more likely clock problems will arise; see https://codeofmatt.com/on-the-timing-of-time-zone-changes for examples."
On Thu Jul 02 22:20:44 2020, Andrew Smith wrote:
I work for the Government of Yukon in Canada. We are in the process of revising our definition of time to be permanently on UTC -7, no longer observing a twice-annual time change. I was on the hunt for authoritative standards related to time, and saw the IANA come up as caretaker of the time zone database, which appears to be relied on for software and systems. I started with ISO 8601, but couldn't see the full text to know if there are time zone standards there. I am contacting you to see your TZ database is a widely adopted and authoritative as it seems, to see if there is any process to making this adjustment in your TZ database, and perhaps to know if there are other agencies that should be aware of what Yukon is planning. From what I see now, TZ database names "America/Dawson", "America/Whitehorse" and "Canada/Yukon" would be affected by this change.
Our regulation is not yet complete, so it is not law at this time and I am not looking for immediate change. We are aiming for finalization here by November 1, 2020.
-- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
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