Hello, I have one question/proposal. Recently I ran into a problem because my calendar shows the "America/Costa_Rica" time zone appointments as "Central Time", which seems to be the designation so far. However at the moment, I checked several sources about the current "Central Time" and it is currently UTC-05:00, whereas in "America/Costa_Rica" it is UTC-06:00. Here in Costa Rica we don't use the customary North American time zones (Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern), we just call it "the local time", as is the rest of Central America. We are very small countries so those designations doesn't make sense. I can drive from the Pacific coast to Caribbean/Atlantic coast through the mountains and the central valley in a few hours! :-) What would be the procedure to suggest an standardized "Central America" time zone? I just checked the tz database, and it shows America/Costa_Rica as designated with C%sT. Should it come from the local governmental science/tech departments? Is this related to ISO or other international organization? I have seen that Microsoft uses a "TZID=Central America Standard Time" which is more culturally sensitive and appropriate than using the other designations. Thanks for your time. -- Ing. Rodolfo Quesada Zumbado http://www.roqz.net roqz@roqz.net
On 9/4/19 6:57 AM, Rodolfo Quesada Zumbado wrote:
What would be the procedure to suggest an standardized "Central America" time zone?
tzdb doesn't attempt to prescribe names like "Central Time" or "Central America Time" for time zones. It tries only to describes common abbreviations when people are writing in English about the locations' timestamps. If you're worried about names like "Central Time", you'll need to contact whoever's supplying that phrase because it's not us. The story is more complicated for abbreviations like "CST", where POSIX requires some sort of abbreviation. Until 2016 tzdb used alphabetic abbreviations for all locations, because POSIX formerly required them. For North and Central America we used the US/Canada abbreviations since that was easier. For South America I invented abbreviations like "PET" for time in Peru. Some years after POSIX stopped requiring alphabetic abbreviations, we removed the South American inventions and used numeric abbreviations like "-05" instead. In contrast, for Mexican timestamps the North American abbreviations seem to be in common use in English, so we kept them there. Central America is on the border. One can find English-language sources that use North American phrases or abbreviations, such as "Costa Rica is on Central Standard Time" (Costa Rica for Dummies, p. 363) or "Time zone UTC-6 (CST)" (Costa Rica: Doing Business, Investing in Costa Rica Guide, p. 11), and one can find sources that don't, such as "Time zone UTC-06:00 (UTC-6)" (Costa Rica Medical & Pharmaceutical Industry Handbook, p. 9), or sources that waffle, such as "Costa Rica is in the same time zone as the Central Standard Zone in the U.S. (-06:00 GMT)" (Martindale-Hubble 2003, p. CU-1). My impression, after a quick look into this with a search engine, is that although there is no standard "CST" is reasonably common (maybe even a majority) for English-language sources writing about Costa Rica. So I'm somewhat inclined to have tzdb continue to "CST" etc. in Central America, if only because it's better to leave the database alone unless there's a good argument to change it. However, if I'm looking at the wrong sources please let me know.
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Paul Eggert -
Rodolfo Quesada Zumbado