I'm forwarding this message from Bill Unruh, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately. --ado -----Original Message----- From: Bill Unruh [mailto:unruh@physics.ubc.ca] Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2009 6:35 To: Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] Cc: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: RE: Pacific-New On Sun, 22 Feb 2009, Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] wrote:
The "pacificnew" file includes information about legislation that was introduced (but not passed) in the United States Congress; it serves to explain why a "Pacific-New" time zone was created in the first place. Note that the last line of the file is a "Link America/Los_Angeles US/Pacific-New" line, meaning that using either name now has the same effect.
I guess I object strongly to including legislative proposals into the tzdata files. If we introduce a new file and a new timezone everytime some government official makes some silly comment about time, the whole edifice will collapse under the weight of that garbage. While the tzdata file is not an official publication it is regarded as pretty authoritiative by most people using computers in the world. It should therefore strive to be accurate and authoritative, and not get bogged down with irrelevancies, and political commentary or jokes (which is the only thing I can imagine that the Pacific-New timezone to be).
As to jokes and idiocy: there used to be an obscure bit of word play
in
an strftime.c comment; it was eliminated in version 7.40.-)
Never saw it. I am not above jokes and wordplay but not when it extends to introducing new time zones in at least semi-authoritative publications. Are we going to get an Okeefenokie time zone because someone likes Pogo-- or a US/BUSH timezone (constantly set to midnight) as political commentary on the last president? That an ill-considered proposal popped up in Congress 20 years ago but was never passed should not be memorialised by a new time zone in tzdata. My response was triggered when a Suse user said his distro assigned Pacific-New to him. Having never seen it before (Mandriva wisely does not have it), I looked at the tzdata file and found it. Please please remove it.
--ado
-- William G. Unruh | Canadian Institute for| Tel: +1(604)822-3273 Physics&Astronomy | Advanced Research | Fax: +1(604)822-5324 UBC, Vancouver,BC | Program in Cosmology | unruh@physics.ubc.ca Canada V6T 1Z1 | and Gravity | www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 18:43, Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] < olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov> wrote:
I'm forwarding this message from Bill Unruh, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately.
--ado
-----Original Message----- From: Bill Unruh [mailto:unruh@physics.ubc.ca] Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2009 6:35 To: Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] Cc: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: RE: Pacific-New
On Sun, 22 Feb 2009, Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] wrote:
The "pacificnew" file includes information about legislation that was introduced (but not passed) in the United States Congress; it serves to explain why a "Pacific-New" time zone was created in the first place. Note that the last line of the file is a "Link America/Los_Angeles US/Pacific-New" line, meaning that using either name now has the same effect.
I guess I object strongly to including legislative proposals into the tzdata files. If we introduce a new file and a new timezone everytime some government official makes some silly comment about time, the whole edifice will collapse under the weight of that garbage. While the tzdata file is not an official publication it is regarded as pretty authoritiative by most people using computers in the world. It should therefore strive to be accurate and authoritative, and not get bogged down with irrelevancies, and political commentary or jokes (which is the only thing I can imagine that the Pacific-New timezone to be).
As to jokes and idiocy: there used to be an obscure bit of word play
in
an strftime.c comment; it was eliminated in version 7.40.-)
Never saw it. I am not above jokes and wordplay but not when it extends to introducing new time zones in at least semi-authoritative publications. Are we going to get an Okeefenokie time zone because someone likes Pogo-- or a US/BUSH timezone (constantly set to midnight) as political commentary on the last president? That an ill-considered proposal popped up in Congress 20 years ago but was never passed should not be memorialised by a new time zone in tzdata.
My response was triggered when a Suse user said his distro assigned Pacific-New to him. Having never seen it before (Mandriva wisely does not have it), I looked at the tzdata file and found it. Please please remove it.
--ado
-- William G. Unruh | Canadian Institute for| Tel: +1(604)822-3273 Physics&Astronomy | Advanced Research | Fax: +1(604)822-5324 UBC, Vancouver,BC | Program in Cosmology | unruh@physics.ubc.ca Canada V6T 1Z1 | and Gravity | www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/
I thought this was pertinent: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/13.87.html#subj1 Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> Mon, 26 Oct 92 14:47:57 PST Several people on the west coast of the US reported that their Unix systems failed to switch from daylight savings time to standard time yesterday, 25 October 1992. The reason? When they originally configured their systems, they were asked to choose one of the following time zone rules: US/Alaska US/Central US/Hawaii US/Pacific US/Aleutian US/East-Indiana US/Michigan US/Pacific-New US/Arizona US/Eastern US/Mountain US/Samoa ... Some people chose 'US/Pacific-New' instead of 'US/Pacific'. After all, who wants the old version when you can have the new version? Unfortunately, 'US/Pacific-New' stands for "Pacific Presidential Election Time", which was passed by the House in April 1989 but never signed into law. In presidential election years, this rule would have delayed the PDT-to-PST switchover until after the election, to lessen the effect of broadcast news election projections on last-minute west-coast voters. Thus, US/Pacific-New and US/Pacific have always been identical -- until yesterday. This problem comes from combining Arthur David Olson's deservedly popular time zone software (which you can FTP from elsie.nci.nih.gov in pub/tz92b.tar.Z) with some overly terse vendor-supplied installation procedures. No doubt Olson did not use a more informative name like 'US/Pacific-Presidential-Election' because of the 14-character file name length limit in many Unix file systems. In view of yesterday's experience, though, it seems unwise to make the hypothetical choice available under any name, since it gives free rein to Murphy's Law. Steve Ward
Are there any systems out in the wild now where setting the TZ environment variable to US/Pacific-New does something different than setting it to US/Pacific? If so, can someone send along a typescript showing the difference? Thanks. --ado
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:55:38 -0500 From: "Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]" <olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov> Message-ID: <B410D30A78C6404C9DABEA31B54A2813029A04DE@nihcesmlbx10.nih.gov> | Are there any systems out in the wild now where setting the TZ | environment variable to US/Pacific-New does something different than | setting it to US/Pacific? Note that report was from 1992 - back then they probably were different. Anyone running on 1992 timezone data today is going to have far worse problems than that one, so I don't think we really need to worry about it. The zone name has to remain like all historical ones, for the people who have been using it - so the requests to make it vanish are never going to happen (if we "deleted" it, it would just move from a file of its own into the "backward" file, which hardly seems like a change worth making). Just ignore the noise and let us all return to pondering what happens next in Brazil or Argentina ... kre
| Are there any systems out in the wild now where setting the TZ | environment variable to US/Pacific-New does something different than | setting it to US/Pacific?
Note that report was from 1992 - back then they probably were different. Anyone running on 1992 timezone data today is going to have far worse problems than that one, so I don't think we really need to worry about it.
The zone name has to remain like all historical ones, ...
If it's historical, yes. The original comment was that it isn't, that it is fictional. If so, I agree that it should be removed completely, just as any other bugs are removed. The same applies to such fictional things as leap seconds at midnight New York time rather than midnight UTC -- another item that came up recently. paul
Robert Elz wrote:
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:55:38 -0500 From: "Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]" <olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov> Message-ID: <B410D30A78C6404C9DABEA31B54A2813029A04DE@nihcesmlbx10.nih.gov>
| Are there any systems out in the wild now where setting the TZ | environment variable to US/Pacific-New does something different than | setting it to US/Pacific?
Note that report was from 1992 - back then they probably were different. Anyone running on 1992 timezone data today is going to have far worse problems than that one, so I don't think we really need to worry about it.
The zone name has to remain like all historical ones, for the people who have been using it - so the requests to make it vanish are never going to happen (if we "deleted" it, it would just move from a file of its own into the "backward" file, which hardly seems like a change worth making).
The problem is, that this was never officially a timezone. It might be akin to adding daylight savings to the Australia/Brisbane timezone data and calling it Brisbane-New -- Lorn 'ljp' Potter Software Engineer, Qt Software R & D, Nokia Pty Ltd
participants (5)
-
Lorn Potter -
Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] -
Paul Koning -
Robert Elz -
Steve Ward