Europe/Zaporozhye
Recently during a conversation about the tzdb and a colleague of mine mentioned that it seems to be a strange outlier that Europe/Zaporozhye has its own zone, since Zaporozh'ye is not a particularly large city (it's quite close to Donetsk, which he deemed more likely to be the major city in the area). I looked at the source code and saw that it mentions: # Zaporozh'ye and eastern Lugansk oblasts observed DST 1990/1991. (https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe#L3850) He seemed to think that this was an absurd notion and that more or less any city in Ukraine would either follow Moscow time or Crimea time, but none of them would have yet a third history. It does seem a bit strange (though perfectly consistent with the weird nonsense everyone else gets up to) that only Zaporozh'ye and eastern Lugansk would follow a different time zone than their immediate neighbors - these are not even contiguous regions. In the timezone-boundary-builder project (https://github.com/evansiroky/timezone-boundary-builder), it seems that only Zaporozhia Oblast is included in the shapefile. We did a cursory search for references (including in the archives of this mailing list and the git history) in English and Russian and couldn't find any reference to Zaporozhia and Lugansk having a different time zone that wasn't derived from this project. So, questions about this: 1. Can anyone point to a reference to the fact that these regions used a different time zone than their neighbors? 2. If no reference is handy, does anyone know on what basis this zone was included in the database in the first place? 3. Is there any clarification as to the geographic extent of the zone? Does it cover Donetsk as well? What part of Lugansk counts as "eastern Lugansk"? Best, Paul
Paul G wrote:
1. Can anyone point to a reference to the fact that these regions used a different time zone than their neighbors?
I think I got that from Shanks. His International Atlas (4th edition) says that Zaporožje (his preferred spelling; 47N50, 35E10) uses his Ukraine Time Table 18. TT#18 differs from the usual one (Time Table 1) for post-1970 Ukraine timestamps in that TT#1 did not observe DST in 1990 or 1991, switched from +03 to +02 on 1990-07-01 at 02:00 and then began using DST in 1992, whereas TT#18 observed DST in both 1990 and 1991 and switched from +03/+04 to +02/+03 on 1991-03-31 by not adjusting the clocks that day. As far as I know, Shanks is the only source for this information. Given that Shanks has been unreliable in the past, the info could well be wrong.
3. Is there any clarification as to the geographic extent of the zone? Does it cover Donetsk as well? What part of Lugansk counts as "eastern Lugansk"?
Oh, for that one would need to carefully consult Shanks's tables that map geogralphical locations to time tables. They're about six pages of verrry small print in 3 columns on 8.5x11 paper, so it's not something one would want to do casually. I don't remember exactly, but my guess is that I just eyeballed them and tried to characterize them generally, way back when, and possibly Shanks did something similar when he came up with the tables in the first place.
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Paul G