On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 07:12:55AM -0600, Bill Seymour wrote:
On 11/23/07, Ken Pizzini <tz_@explicate.org> wrote:
The important thing to remember is that the rules specify *transitions*.
That's what I thought, too, until I realized that the SAVE and LETTER/S columns specify states, not transitions. Consider for example:
Rule US 1942 only - Feb 9 2:00 1:00 W # War Rule US 1945 only - Aug 14 23:00u 1:00 P # Peace
The second of those is /not/ an instruction to set my clock ahead an hour.
Though UTC/GMT offset didn't change, that's still a transition. The name of (and abbreviation for) the zone *did* transition at 23:00u on 1945-08-14.
But my real question was about the replacement text for "%s" in the Zone's FORMAT when there has been no "transition" to set the LETTER/S initially.
Ah, right. This came up before. The correct answer is as you state here:
When changing to a named Rule before the first one exists, move forward in time to the first with a SAVE of 0 and use the LETTER/S from that.
This shortcoming of the zic.8 documentation has come up before, but no consensus about how to word a fix was acheived. Perhaps your suggestion above will have better luck, or at least inspire a more fruitful round of wordsmithing this time... --Ken Pizzini