On 2017-06-12 16:17, Paul Eggert wrote:
Michael H Deckers wrote:
• assumptions that the day of the week was set back from Saturday to Friday at 15:30 or at 15:33:32 local time
I don't think that's how things happened. Rousseau documents his expedition purely from an American timekeeping point of view, and I have little doubt that the Americans in Sitka kept American time throughout. So in practice, Sitka had overlapping time zones (much like Ürümqi today) for at least a day or two. We don't want to create a new time zone entry just for this problem: we need a single point of transition. The best single point I can think of is the 15:30 time of the Ossipee's salute.
Nobody can argue with that (;-)). The proposed change would make civil time at Sitka switch from Saturday, 1867-10-19 15:30 to Friday, 1867-10-18 15:30. If that is not how things have happened then the proposal should, in my humble opinion, be changed to something that could have happened, even if it becomes less interesting culturally. Is "kept American time" supposed to imply that Americans in Sitka did not use the same days of the week as the Russians? That would be hard to believe and certainly would need some evidence. What we do have evidence for is that the Russian Church in Alaska tried to keep the old time scale for liturgical purposes. See eg Ian R Bartky: "One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity". 2007. partly on line at [https://books.google.de/books/about /One_Time_Fits_All.html?id=rC6sAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y] page 26. But of course, that happened after the switch in question, not before it, and it does not concern civil time, the subject of tzdb. Michael Deckers. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus