I received a copy of this message via private mail, not copied to the list - and replied (as below) - then I saw another copy of the message was sent to the list, so I am forwarding my reply to the list as well... Date: Wed, 2 May 2012 16:42:58 +0200 From: Tobias Conradi <mail.2012@tobiasconradi.com> Message-ID: <CAAGevbUqw308pGi7bYYNeZrwwvwtinqqskvW0Jv8aTOcESzMnA@mai= l.gmail.com> | Suggested new zone: | Asia/Barnaul, split from Asia/Omsk But why? What's different about the zones, aside from their names? | Moves to Omsk Time That tells me nothing. | FIX: oblast should be Republic. Do you mean that we should change the word we use? Could you explain why (and it would be better on the list than in private mail to m= e). | > that isn't "making up new rules on the fly" | If not on the fly, it should be specified in the Theory file, so that= | contributors are warned that their fixes may not be added for 7+ | months if they don't affect current time stamps. No, that's not why the changes you want didn't get made - it is because no-one understands what was supposed to be changed, or why. It might be obvious to you, it isn't to anyone else. | I think you are misinformed here. E.g. for | "Zone Asia/Omsk" it says in tzdata2012c\europe | #... [This region consists of] | # Respublika Altaj, Altajskij kraj, Omskaya oblast'. Sure, we attempt to indicate what region the zone applies in, and we will fix bugs in that if we understand what the bug is, but the purpose of the project isn't to make those mappings, that's one of the frills - we collect that data more so we know that we have all of the needed zones, not so the region data can be used for anything very useful. If that's allowed you to find a missing zone, that's great, but we can't just make a new zone with no data in it, we need to know what to put there, and it needs to be different from the existing zones, we avoid making duplicates (within a country). kre