The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone
Dear Sir, Hope this email finds you well and wishing you a joyful new year . We would like to inform you that The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone. Kindly refer to the attachment below, which includes the specification and please provide me with any comments or notes you have regarding this specification. Ps: Please provide me with any comments you have. Sincerely Yours, Eng.Heba Hamad MTIT -Palestine Sent from Mail for Windows
Hi, The competence of the PSI to issue this Standard is not in doubt. I am unclear about a couple of things, in relation to this (IANA, Olson) TZ project. 1. I believe your "Fundamental Principles #4" refers to the current TZ database. 2. Pont #6 refers to the Palestinian Government as the "Publisher". Do you plan to publish or re-publish the TZ database? Or only a separate one? 3. On Structure, point #1 is unobjectionable. 4. Point #2 states that the "State of Palestine" has the "sole right to set, modify, and register the ... Database". Which Database is this? The IANA one or the one PSI will publish, or re-publish? -- Sanjeev Gupta +65 98551208 http://www.linkedin.com/in/ghane On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 4:23 PM Heba Hamad via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
Dear Sir,
Hope this email finds you well and wishing you a joyful new year . We would like to inform you that The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone. Kindly refer to the attachment below, which includes the specification and please provide me with any comments or notes you have regarding this specification. Ps: Please provide me with any comments you have.
Sincerely Yours,
Eng.Heba Hamad
MTIT -Palestine
Sent from Mail <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows
Hi, What is meant in general is that the State of Palestine (the Palestinian government) is the only authorized one to address the international bodies, including IANA, to request any amendment, update, registration, or anything else related to the subject, or to publish any official decisions regarding the time Zone of the State of Palestine. Best regards , Sent from Mail for Windows From: Sanjeev Gupta Sent: Tuesday, January 4, 2022 11:13 AM To: heba.hamad@mtit.gov.ps Cc: tz@iana.org; rasheed hanoon; laith.daraghmeh@mtit.gov.ps Subject: Re: [tz] The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of thespecification for its time zone Hi, The competence of the PSI to issue this Standard is not in doubt. I am unclear about a couple of things, in relation to this (IANA, Olson) TZ project. 1. I believe your "Fundamental Principles #4" refers to the current TZ database. 2. Pont #6 refers to the Palestinian Government as the "Publisher". Do you plan to publish or re-publish the TZ database? Or only a separate one? 3. On Structure, point #1 is unobjectionable. 4. Point #2 states that the "State of Palestine" has the "sole right to set, modify, and register the ... Database". Which Database is this? The IANA one or the one PSI will publish, or re-publish? -- Sanjeev Gupta +65 98551208 http://www.linkedin.com/in/ghane On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 4:23 PM Heba Hamad via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote: Dear Sir, Hope this email finds you well and wishing you a joyful new year . We would like to inform you that The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone. Kindly refer to the attachment below, which includes the specification and please provide me with any comments or notes you have regarding this specification. Ps: Please provide me with any comments you have. Sincerely Yours, Eng.Heba Hamad MTIT -Palestine Sent from Mail for Windows
Most of your concerns have been addressed by others, but I noticed in reading your document, in section 7, in the two examples on page 8, you have "Australia Western Standard Time" listed as a standard time which does not vary within a year (in Example 1) and Australian Central Standard Time listed as one which does vary within a year (in Example 2). I'm not exactly sure of the point of those examples, and it is certainly true that "standard time" can be said to be the local time as specified at any point during the year. If you meant that Western Australia does not observe summer time, whereas South Australia does, then that would be fine - but that does not seem likely as an interpretation, as you have US Eastern in Example 1, and summer time (daylight saving) is certainly used there (you even have USEST and USEDT both listed there). Otherwise, if "standard time" is intended to represent the "natural" offset from UTC (your definition in section 6 is not clear which of those meanings is intended) then Australian Central Standard Time varies no more or less than Australia Western Standard Time does. In summer, in South Australia, but not the Northern Territory, Australian Central Summer Time applies (which is the standard time by the earlier definition here). Or more correctly, just Central Standard Time and Central Summer Time - adding "Australian" as a prefix isn't really necessary in Australia, and is not in any legislation I have ever seen. Perhaps because the abbreviation is ACST (or just CST) in both cases leads to some confusion here - but as Paul Eggert said in his reply, those abbreviations are largely meaningless (many single timezone areas don't bother to name the time, as anything other than the time - there is no need to distinguish it from any other time within the jurisdiction, and with no name for the time, have no abbreviation either). I am not sure why Palestine feels the need to label its time - it is unlikely it will ever span sufficient degrees of longitude to need more than one zone, and actually separately labeling standard vs summer time tend to cause more problems than it solves - there should be just "the time", that its offset from UTC varies during the year isn't relevant to that, 16:00 is 16:00, whether than happens to be 14:00 UTC or 13:00 UTC (or something different). Also as Paul hinted, the major factor in achieving: Palestine in particular will be able to reduce systems downtime, human effort and last-minute arrangements that is caused by not having a unified time zone and also not being able to have a clear road map for setting daylight saving time as well as providing certainty that the given information is relevant to the State of Palestine country of ownership. (quoted from your Introduction - page 5) is to publish changes long in advance of when they are to take effect. It can take a very long time for systems to be updated to new rules (some are designed without that capacity at all, unfortunately) - authorities that expect a change notified a month (or less) in advance of its effective date are more or less guaranteeing disruption, and (perhaps) system down time. Making changes very infrequently, and always with lots of notice -- Paul suggested a year, I'd advocate even more than that. This applies not only to a change to be made, but to a planned change being abandoned as well - that also needs just as much advance notification as the original change needed, as updates will otherwise already have started being distributed with the earlier announced change included - a whole new set of updates is required to reverse that. One last comment here - the time zone database *always* reflects the time that the people of the region actually use in their day to day lives. What authority sets that time is not our concern, and your ability to influence what goes into the time zone data base is limited entirely by your ability to influence the times that the people (railways, busses, radio and TV, airlines, schools, banks, ...) all use. As long as you set those times, the times you set (whether reported to us by you, or someone else) will be what the time zone data base contains. If it turns out that at some future time someone else is deciding what the local clocks should indicate, then it will be their time offsets and change dates in the database, not yours. None of this is any different for Palestine than anywhere else in the world. kre
Dear Mr. Robert, All your comments will be taken into consideration and sent to our Standards Preparation Committee for review Best Respects, Sent from Mail for Windows From: Robert Elz Sent: Wednesday, January 5, 2022 2:03 AM To: heba.hamad@mtit.gov.ps Cc: tz@iana.org; asheed hanoon; laith.daraghmeh@mtit.gov.ps Subject: Re: [tz] The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone Most of your concerns have been addressed by others, but I noticed in reading your document, in section 7, in the two examples on page 8, you have "Australia Western Standard Time" listed as a standard time which does not vary within a year (in Example 1) and Australian Central Standard Time listed as one which does vary within a year (in Example 2). I'm not exactly sure of the point of those examples, and it is certainly true that "standard time" can be said to be the local time as specified at any point during the year. If you meant that Western Australia does not observe summer time, whereas South Australia does, then that would be fine - but that does not seem likely as an interpretation, as you have US Eastern in Example 1, and summer time (daylight saving) is certainly used there (you even have USEST and USEDT both listed there). Otherwise, if "standard time" is intended to represent the "natural" offset from UTC (your definition in section 6 is not clear which of those meanings is intended) then Australian Central Standard Time varies no more or less than Australia Western Standard Time does. In summer, in South Australia, but not the Northern Territory, Australian Central Summer Time applies (which is the standard time by the earlier definition here). Or more correctly, just Central Standard Time and Central Summer Time - adding "Australian" as a prefix isn't really necessary in Australia, and is not in any legislation I have ever seen. Perhaps because the abbreviation is ACST (or just CST) in both cases leads to some confusion here - but as Paul Eggert said in his reply, those abbreviations are largely meaningless (many single timezone areas don't bother to name the time, as anything other than the time - there is no need to distinguish it from any other time within the jurisdiction, and with no name for the time, have no abbreviation either). I am not sure why Palestine feels the need to label its time - it is unlikely it will ever span sufficient degrees of longitude to need more than one zone, and actually separately labeling standard vs summer time tend to cause more problems than it solves - there should be just "the time", that its offset from UTC varies during the year isn't relevant to that, 16:00 is 16:00, whether than happens to be 14:00 UTC or 13:00 UTC (or something different). Also as Paul hinted, the major factor in achieving: Palestine in particular will be able to reduce systems downtime, human effort and last-minute arrangements that is caused by not having a unified time zone and also not being able to have a clear road map for setting daylight saving time as well as providing certainty that the given information is relevant to the State of Palestine country of ownership. (quoted from your Introduction - page 5) is to publish changes long in advance of when they are to take effect. It can take a very long time for systems to be updated to new rules (some are designed without that capacity at all, unfortunately) - authorities that expect a change notified a month (or less) in advance of its effective date are more or less guaranteeing disruption, and (perhaps) system down time. Making changes very infrequently, and always with lots of notice -- Paul suggested a year, I'd advocate even more than that. This applies not only to a change to be made, but to a planned change being abandoned as well - that also needs just as much advance notification as the original change needed, as updates will otherwise already have started being distributed with the earlier announced change included - a whole new set of updates is required to reverse that. One last comment here - the time zone database *always* reflects the time that the people of the region actually use in their day to day lives. What authority sets that time is not our concern, and your ability to influence what goes into the time zone data base is limited entirely by your ability to influence the times that the people (railways, busses, radio and TV, airlines, schools, banks, ...) all use. As long as you set those times, the times you set (whether reported to us by you, or someone else) will be what the time zone data base contains. If it turns out that at some future time someone else is deciding what the local clocks should indicate, then it will be their time offsets and change dates in the database, not yours. None of this is any different for Palestine than anywhere else in the world. kre
At 12:22 AM 04-01-2022, Heba Hamad via tz wrote:
Kindly refer to the attachment below, which includes the specification and please provide me with any comments or notes you have regarding this specification. Ps: Please provide me with any comments you have.
The "national Standard" states that [The State] has the sole right to set, modify and register the Standard Time Zone; Name / Database / DST". Is the standard asserting rights on the public-domain time zone database? Regards, -sm
Heba Hamad via tz said:
Dear Sir,
Hope this email finds you well and wishing you a joyful new year . We would like to inform you that The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone. Kindly refer to the attachment below, which includes the specification and please provide me with any comments or notes you have regarding this specification. Ps: Please provide me with any comments you have. Sincerely Yours,
Eng.Heba Hamad
Dear Mr Hamad, My apologies for the length of time this reply has taken, but here are some comments on your document. Page 6 item 2: the second paragraph looks more like a definition of local time than of UTC. Compare with item 6 on the next page. Page 7 item 7: while this is the commonest form of "daylight saving time" or "summer time", as it is usually known in Europe, it is not the only possibility: * Some countries have two switches forward and two back per year, for example to move back to standard time for Ramadan then forward for the rest of the summer. * At least historically, some places have had two forward shifts at different points in spring and then two backwards shifts at different point in the autumn. * Not all shifts are an hour: Lord Howe Island in Australia has a shift of 30 minutes forward in the summer. * At least one country defines "standard time" as being the time in the summer, with a shift back to "winter time" in autumn and then forward to standard time in spring. * There is at least one historical record where an area put the clocks forward in winter because of an unusual geography. You might at least want to delete the words "one hour from standard time". Page 8: note 1 to entry contradicts the definitions. Item 6 on page 7 implies that "standard time" is a fixed offset from UTC whereas this implies it isn't. Page 9 item 1: the range of dates under consideration affects time zones. The IANA database normally only looks at the situation from 1970 onwards. Picking other starting dates will affect which time zones exist because places differed in time before 1970 but not after it. This is why the IANA database has both Asia/Gaza and Asia/Hebron. Page 9 item 4: this is a description of the IANA TZ database. It is possible for other TZ databases to exist and they might not match that defintion. Also note that updates can be for changes made other than by political bodies (the IANA TZ database works on what actually happens on the ground, not what politicians say what happens). Page 10 item 5: "Government is expected to select these names alone" is, I'm afraid, false. Each database owner selects these names. The IANA database normally uses names of the form "continent/city" or "continent/region/city", but another database might use simple numbers or randomly allocated four-letter strings instead. Page 10 item 6: the description doesn't bear any relationship to the Palestinian Government. Page 11 first line: is the text beginning "This specification" meant to be the start of a new item? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with "Observance". Page 11 item 1: I'm not clear what the purpose of this item is. Page 11 item 2: the first paragraph describes the IANA TZ database rules and other TZ databases may differ. The last sentence of the second paragraph is not true, I'm afraid, since each TZ author can pick their own values and accept registrations or other information from anyone. I suspect you may have got your concepts confused. May I please suggest alternative wording? ==== BEGIN ==== The Structure: 1. Palestine Time Zone Palestine will use a single time zone. The State of Palestine is the Palestine Time Zone owner. It has the sole right to determine: - the UTC offset for the zone - the rules for changing this offset at different times of the year - the names and abbreviations used for the time in Palestine in official Palestinian documents. Note: before 2013 Palestine had two time zones using the meaning under "Fundamental Principles". Therefore some distributions may continue to use two time zones in order to represent pre-2013 data. 2. Names and abbreviations Palestine will use the terms and abbreviations "Palestine Standard Time (PSST)" for the time in Palestine during standard time and "Palestine Daylight Time (PSDT)" for the time in Palestine during Daylight Savings. ==== END ==== Legal clause: you of course have the right to determine the name used in official Palestinian documents and the official time used in Palestine. But you cannot determine the name of the time zone in any given database because that's decided by the database owner. Note, here, the difference between your official names (e.g. "PSST"), which you ahve the exclusive right to decide, and names used by others (e.g. "Asia/Gaza" or "A261"), which you don't. Yours sincerely, Clive D.W. Feather -- Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler, Email: clive@davros.org | it will get its revenge. Web: http://www.davros.org | - Henry Spencer Mobile: +44 7973 377646
,Dear Sir .Thanks for your feedback.All of your comments will be taken in to consideration,and I will send it to our standards commitee for review ,Best Regards في الاثنين, يناير 24, 2022 05:15 EST, "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive@davros.org> كتب: Heba Hamad via tz said:
Dear Sir,
Hope this email finds you well and wishing you a joyful new year . We would like to inform you that The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone. Kindly refer to the attachment below, which includes the specification and please provide me with any comments or notes you have regarding this specification. Ps: Please provide me with any comments you have. Sincerely Yours,
Eng.Heba Hamad
Dear Mr Hamad, My apologies for the length of time this reply has taken, but here are some comments on your document. Page 6 item 2: the second paragraph looks more like a definition of local time than of UTC. Compare with item 6 on the next page. Page 7 item 7: while this is the commonest form of "daylight saving time" or "summer time", as it is usually known in Europe, it is not the only possibility: * Some countries have two switches forward and two back per year, for example to move back to standard time for Ramadan then forward for the rest of the summer. * At least historically, some places have had two forward shifts at different points in spring and then two backwards shifts at different point in the autumn. * Not all shifts are an hour: Lord Howe Island in Australia has a shift of 30 minutes forward in the summer. * At least one country defines "standard time" as being the time in the summer, with a shift back to "winter time" in autumn and then forward to standard time in spring. * There is at least one historical record where an area put the clocks forward in winter because of an unusual geography. You might at least want to delete the words "one hour from standard time". Page 8: note 1 to entry contradicts the definitions. Item 6 on page 7 implies that "standard time" is a fixed offset from UTC whereas this implies it isn't. Page 9 item 1: the range of dates under consideration affects time zones. The IANA database normally only looks at the situation from 1970 onwards. Picking other starting dates will affect which time zones exist because places differed in time before 1970 but not after it. This is why the IANA database has both Asia/Gaza and Asia/Hebron. Page 9 item 4: this is a description of the IANA TZ database. It is possible for other TZ databases to exist and they might not match that defintion. Also note that updates can be for changes made other than by political bodies (the IANA TZ database works on what actually happens on the ground, not what politicians say what happens). Page 10 item 5: "Government is expected to select these names alone" is, I'm afraid, false. Each database owner selects these names. The IANA database normally uses names of the form "continent/city" or "continent/region/city", but another database might use simple numbers or randomly allocated four-letter strings instead. Page 10 item 6: the description doesn't bear any relationship to the Palestinian Government. Page 11 first line: is the text beginning "This specification" meant to be the start of a new item? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with "Observance". Page 11 item 1: I'm not clear what the purpose of this item is. Page 11 item 2: the first paragraph describes the IANA TZ database rules and other TZ databases may differ. The last sentence of the second paragraph is not true, I'm afraid, since each TZ author can pick their own values and accept registrations or other information from anyone. I suspect you may have got your concepts confused. May I please suggest alternative wording? ==== BEGIN ==== The Structure: 1. Palestine Time Zone Palestine will use a single time zone. The State of Palestine is the Palestine Time Zone owner. It has the sole right to determine: - the UTC offset for the zone - the rules for changing this offset at different times of the year - the names and abbreviations used for the time in Palestine in official Palestinian documents. Note: before 2013 Palestine had two time zones using the meaning under "Fundamental Principles". Therefore some distributions may continue to use two time zones in order to represent pre-2013 data. 2. Names and abbreviations Palestine will use the terms and abbreviations "Palestine Standard Time (PSST)" for the time in Palestine during standard time and "Palestine Daylight Time (PSDT)" for the time in Palestine during Daylight Savings. ==== END ==== Legal clause: you of course have the right to determine the name used in official Palestinian documents and the official time used in Palestine. But you cannot determine the name of the time zone in any given database because that's decided by the database owner. Note, here, the difference between your official names (e.g. "PSST"), which you ahve the exclusive right to decide, and names used by others (e.g. "Asia/Gaza" or "A261"), which you don't. Yours sincerely, Clive D.W. Feather -- Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler, Email: clive@davros.org | it will get its revenge. Web: http://www.davros.org | - Henry Spencer Mobile: +44 7973 377646
participants (5)
-
Clive D.W. Feather -
heba.hamad＠mtit.gov.ps -
Robert Elz -
Sanjeev Gupta -
SM