That's not really a coherent argument against the proposal.

It can mean that — and of course once did, approximately — but anymore, it generally doesn't, and there's little correlation between the two.  Where I live, at this time of year, "solar midnight" is approximately 01:07 local time, but if I just say "midnight" to any of my friends or colleagues, they know unambiguously that I'm referring to the time-of-day when the wall clocks say 00:00, regardless of where the sun might be at that time.  (Although, in any given social context, it might more accurately refer to 24:00 on a particular day, that's ultimately just the same time-of-day expressed differently.)  There would no confusion that I might mean "solar midnight" or even "standard midnight" unless I were in very particular technical settings.

I'm not sure how the Ethiopian words for "midnight" and "noon" translate, but the fact that they would number those both as 6 (in a 12-hour system) is what the extra specificity is trying to communicate is (presently) out-of-scope: tz effectively "counts" from 00 at midnight (not considering DST changes), and we already state as much elsewhere.

--
Tim Parenti


On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 at 04:09, Phake Nick <c933103@gmail.com> wrote:
Wait a moment, I thought the term "midnight" usually refer to middle of the night instead of the 00 hours?

2018-10-6 06:52,Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com> wrote:
Sure, but the notion of "wall-clock midnight" under year-round +6 DST is no more or less tied to actual solar midnight than for any other zone as they exist today.  As Steve puts it, hour 00 just represents the hour at which the calendar date changes.

In your extreme example, it may seem odd to say it's midnight when the sun is still setting — and I'm certainly not suggesting Ethiopians would actually do anything remotely similar  But these discrepancies don't stop folks from referring to 00:00 local time as "midnight" in most of the cases we cover, even if it… well… isn't.

Moreover, we already make explicit this convention (tying hour 00 to the Western cultural notion of "midnight") elsewhere: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/b709eb84eaa48354186d4a11c86395e399f19c12/zic.8#L281-L282

Again, I won't be bothered if it's left out, but I also haven't really seen any reason against such a clarification.  Perhaps my proposed wording is not the best.

--
Tim Parenti


On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 at 23:49, Phake Nick <c933103@gmail.com> wrote:
That's not really the case. If some country decided to actually implement a year-round +6 DST, then that would also be included in tz database

 2018-10-5 07:48, Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com> wrote:
For tz's purposes, though (the sentence begins "The tz database models time using…"), those are synonymous.  Of course, this may not be the case if you're using a workaround like the one suggested for Ethiopia, but the goal is to further clarify that that's out of our scope.

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Tim Parenti


On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 at 19:14, Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> wrote:
On Thu 2018-10-04T18:13:56-0400 Tim Parenti hath writ:
> To bring this back, then, to a recognition of the potential differences in
> how the hours are counted, we should probably expand the text in theory
> slightly to specify that tz counts hours under the assumption that 00
> represents midnight.

I think that 00 represents the hour at which the calendar day and date
change.  That may not happen in the middle of the night.

--
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