"Earl C. Ruby III" <earl@switchmanagement.com> writes:
I am trying to locate the maintainer of the timezone/zdump.c program.
tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov is it. I'm removing the other CC's.
I am running several dozen SuSE Linux systems and all of them show the same (incorrect) results when zdump is run for an "Etc/UTC+X" timezone.
The sign convention for Etc/UTC+X is purposely backwards from what you expected.
I've written a set of Perl timezone conversion routines which pull data from zdump. I've added a patch to my software which works around this problem with zdump, but I feel that zdump itself should be fixed to deal with this.
As far as I can see, zdump is correct, and so is zic. My advice is to stay away from those TZ=Etc/* settings. For details, please see the long comment in the etcetera file in the tz distribution.
According to maps at http://inms-ienm.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/images/time_services/TZ01SWE.jpg, http://inms-ienm.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/images/time_services/TZ01SSE.jpg (both dated 2003), and http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/Magazine/SO98/geomap.asp (from a 1998 Canadian Geographic article), the de facto and de jure time for Southampton Island (at the north end of Hudson Bay) is UTC-5 all year round. Using Google, it's easy to find other websites that confirm this. I wasn't able to find how far back this time regimen goes, but since it predates the creation of Nunavut, it probably goes back many years. The tz database doesn't have any Canadian zone that currently observes EST year-round. Since 1974, only two zones have been on EST with no DST rule: America/Rankin_Inlet from 2000-10-29 to 2001-04-01, and America/Cambridge_Bay from 2000-10-29 to 2000-11-05. Both of those periods are too short to tell whether DST would have been observed. Southampton Island has an area of 41,214 km², nearly the size of Switzerland. Almost all of its 759 inhabitants live in Coral Harbour. The Inuktitut name of Coral Harbour is Sallit, but it's rarely used. -- Gwillim Law
participants (2)
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Gwillim Law -
Paul Eggert