Paulo is not on the time zone mailing list; direct replies appropriately. --ado -----Original Message----- From: Paulo Alexandre Pinto Pires [mailto:p@ppires.org] Sent: Monday, October 21, 2002 12:16 PM To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: About rules for Brazil Hello, folks. I have recently downloaded tzdata 2002d, which brings new rules for Brazil again, because the government again changed when summer time starts. I suggest that rules for Brazil don't ever be considered permanent, i.e., make no use of "max" for new rules, but instead use "only". Regardless of a public poll at National Obversatory's (ON is the official source of time information for the country) web site, to learn if Brazilians would like to have fixed dates for start and end of summer time, the dates were changed again because of plain stupidity -- Electoral authorities forgot about summer time at all, and because of stupid machine programming, start of summer time had to be delayed. It is certain that the new rules will not be used in the next year, when there will be no elections, and this delay (hopefully) will not be necessary. Reading the source file for timezone data for Brazil is a joke. Things like a mayor who tries to change time in his city, and authorities forgetting about summer time in planning important occasions are everywhere. Not having fixed rules is a major cause of such a mess. This year, the decree stating that summer time should begin not on the second Sunday of October (yet no such decree ever existed before -- each ear a _new_ decree said "it starts on day X and ends on day Y"), but later, was published by the end of its first week, and not reflected on ON's web site, where most of us used to find such rules. The result is that many people, again, had their clocks wrong. I believe that if clocks eventually go wrong, it would be better if they just remained in the regular time. The effect of not advancing the clock causes less impact (and surprises) than having it unexpectly be one hour ahead.of what users think it should be, because of assuming that rules for the previous year will be used again (even though it sounds very reasonable to our technical ears). So, we now have Rule Brazil 2001 max - Feb Sun>=15 0:00 0 - Rule Brazil 2002 only - Nov 3 0:00 1:00 S Rule Brazil 2003 max - Oct Sun>=8 0:00 1:00 S but this is wrong, if nothing else, at least because of one very simple reason (already mentioned): "Oct Sun>=8" or "Feb Sun>=15" may look like a good aproach, and result of careful observation by some of us, but they are not in any previous decree, and assuming it may fail in the future again (and it fails in the past too, if we start looking back. as far as 1998 and before). Let's not go beyong the facts we know, that is we know when summer time starts in 2002 and ends in 2003, and nothing more. Besides that, let those of us who are Brazilians try to push the goverment into using permanent criterion, so that mess doesn't happen again. (BTW, I didn't have problems this year, because when I noticed that ON didn't publish anything until last year's start date was to close, I dug the Net and found this year's decree). -- Pappires ... Qui habet aurem audiat quid Spiritus dicat ecclesiis.