Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 04:11:55 +0200 From: Tobias Conradi <tobias.conradi@gmail.com> Message-ID: <CAAGevbVsY5SEs=3NGyau7T_aLW+W0cV18tofP3d_aDfjTw1M0w@mail.gmail.com> | Putting something into the wrong timezone is by definition having a | bug in the TIMEZONE database. No, once again, it is not, or not in any way that is important. We make the various timezones, we do not assign them to locations, other than for our convenience in making sure that we have all of the zones defined that we should have. Certainly, if we have those assignments incorrect, they can get fixed - just as we would fix an erroneous comment in the source code of the C files if there was such an erroneous comment, but neither of those is a bug in any real sense. | If that would be true, the project wouldn't exist in that form. | Because anyone could write down all offsets with full seconds from 0 | second to e.g. 30 * 60 * 60, assign names to them and would be | finished. No, that's approximately what existed (in some implementations anyway) when we started - the timezone isn't just the offset from UTC, it is a list of changes of that offset (when summer time started and ended in various years, when the zone offset altered, ...) That complete set of data is a timezone for our purposes, and getting all of those defined (correctly) is what we're attempting to do. Specific locations are only relevant first as picking one to provide a name for the timezone (and the theory file explains how that's done, it isn't relevant to the current discussion) and second, as a way of verifying that we aren't missing a zone definition. | > If the comments in the zone file are wrong, | > we should certainly fix them sometime, | Now you change your opinion? No, not at all, we fix erroneous comments, but erroneous comments are not a bug, as they don't affect the results, they're just a minor insignificant error. Like any error, such things should get fixed, but like other irrelevant errors, fixing them isn't urgent. | Any prove that all the view at | http://stats.grok.se/en/201204/List_of_tz_database_time_zones | are from list members? List members can do whatever they like, and some of the people on this list (and associated with this project) certainly do attempt to make maps of timezones in one way or another. That's all fine, but it is not this project. | >(no-one else is really very likely to | > read through all of that stuff - zic certainly doesn't care.) | I read the comments before I was a list member. Sure, there are people who look at this stuff, but not very many compared with the number of people who use the real product of this project - which is the zone database. kre