FW: About China time zones
I'm forwarding this message from Tom Korte, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately. (While all of China is now officially in one time zone there were different zones until 1980; that's why there are multiple entries in the database. The database started out life with an entry for Chungking; the entry was later changed to use the Pinyin spelling Chongqing, but a Chungking link was kept for backward compatibility. And time zones are as a rule named for the city in the zone with the highest population--at the time the zone was named if not at present.) --ado From: Walter Korte [mailto:Walter.Korte@tomtom.com] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:15 To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: About China time zones To the maintainers of the tz database, We are using the TZ database in our navigation SW, and we have had feedback from our users in China that the time zone city names included do not make sense to local users. Neither Harbin, Shanghai nor Chungking (this is a very strange spelling, it is spelled Chongqing in Pinyin) is used in China to indicate a time zone. It would make most sense to remove these 3 entries and replace them with a single Beijing entry in the database. As HongKong and Macao are special administrative regions (SAR) in China, listing these makes sense. For the cities listed that are located in Xinjiang (Kashgar and Urumqi), these should not be listed as China only has one official time zone. But in practice Xinjiang uses its own time zone so keeping these would be better. Best regards, Walter Korte TomTom Asia
From: Walter Korte [mailto:Walter.Korte@tomtom.com] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:15
Neither Harbin, Shanghai nor Chungking (this is a very strange spelling, it is spelled Chongqing in Pinyin) is used in China to indicate a time zone.
This is the same as the US. People in the US also do not say "Denver" or "Chicago" to denote a time zone. City names like "Denver" (and "Harbin") are needed only for proper support of older time stamps, back when different regions of the country used different rules. China is similar. If users don't care about old time stamps, they can simply set TZ='Asia/Beijing'.
in practice Xinjiang uses its own time zone so keeping these would be better.
Ouch. The time zone database says that Xinjiang currently uses the same time zone as Beijing in practice. So anyone who sets TZ='Asia/Urumqi' will get Beijing time for current time stamps. Do you know of a reliable source on this topic?
I remember a discussion on this weird topic a few months ago -- as I recall, the issue is that the same location has two time zones, depending on the ethnic background of the people involved. So there ended up being two names for the place, describing two rules. And the two names are the names for the place in the two languages that are used there. Then again, it looks like the final result wasn't two rules, but just a pile of comments in the "asia" rule sourcefile, and only the "PRC" rule is actually a live rule. paul On Sep 24, 2010, at 1:27 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
From: Walter Korte [mailto:Walter.Korte@tomtom.com] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:15
Neither Harbin, Shanghai nor Chungking (this is a very strange spelling, it is spelled Chongqing in Pinyin) is used in China to indicate a time zone.
This is the same as the US. People in the US also do not say "Denver" or "Chicago" to denote a time zone. City names like "Denver" (and "Harbin") are needed only for proper support of older time stamps, back when different regions of the country used different rules.
China is similar. If users don't care about old time stamps, they can simply set TZ='Asia/Beijing'.
in practice Xinjiang uses its own time zone so keeping these would be better.
Ouch. The time zone database says that Xinjiang currently uses the same time zone as Beijing in practice. So anyone who sets TZ='Asia/Urumqi' will get Beijing time for current time stamps. Do you know of a reliable source on this topic?
I remember a discussion on this weird topic a few months ago -- as I recall, the issue is that the same location has two time zones, depending on the ethnic background of the people involved. So there ended up being two names for the place, describing two rules. And the two names are the names for the place in the two languages that are used there.
Then again, it looks like the final result wasn't two rules, but just a pile of comments in the "asia" rule sourcefile, and only the "PRC" rule is actually a live rule.
We did end up with just comments. A proposed change was circulated (2009-11-21); we got feedback that making the change might "somewhat divisive" (2009-11-25), so at least for now there's just the pile of comments. --ado
If there is to be only one alternative to choose from, then I certainly welcome your offer to finally incorporate Xinjiang Time that you made last November. My objections were premised on the idea that you might be willing to modify your proposal 1) to be politically correct for China and not attach ethnically colored labels even though we realize that time zone usage is primarily ethnically determined. (As I mentioned the time zones in China are rather referred to in a neutral way by geographical names regardless of their translation. -- your proposal, on the other hand, besides being ethnically colored, actually goes strongly against local Han usage which considers Wulumuqi Time to be identical to Xinjiang Time +0600 UTC), and 2) to consider the ramifications for tzdata implementations when there are two competing names for one geographical point. My own preference was to keep the change simple and, as much as possible, to conform to popular usage. I am still hoping that you would consider these issues, and of course, am hoping to one day see XJ Time in tzdata (and not just in the comments) -mld On Sep 25, 2010, at 9:06 PM, Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] wrote:
I remember a discussion on this weird topic a few months ago -- as I recall, the issue is that the same location has two time zones, depending on the ethnic background of the people involved. So there ended up being two names for the place, describing two rules. And the two names are the names for the place in the two languages that are used there.
Then again, it looks like the final result wasn't two rules, but just a pile of comments in the "asia" rule sourcefile, and only the "PRC" rule is actually a live rule.
We did end up with just comments. A proposed change was circulated (2009-11-21); we got feedback that making the change might "somewhat divisive" (2009-11-25), so at least for now there's just the pile of comments.
--ado
On Sat, 02 Oct 2010, Luther Ma wrote:
I am still hoping that you would consider these issues, and of course, am hoping to one day see XJ Time in tzdata (and not just in the comments)
I read your message as "I like the change in principle, but I don't like the names". Could you suggest names that you think are better? --apb (Alan Barrett)
Yes, Alan, you read me correctly. My suggestion is just to change Urumqi/Asia so that it remains on UTC +6:00 (instead of moving to +8:00 after May 1980). Even though a large part of the population in Urumqi use +8:00 (aka Beijing time) they still know (and officially recognize) Urumqi time (aka Wulumuqi time aka Xinjiang time) as +6:00. I suggested the abbreviation XJT since that is universally understood by all ethnicities and most commonly used, but the pre-1980 abbreviation, URUT is also fine. -mld Kashgar/Asia would of course follow suite. On Oct 2, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Alan Barrett wrote:
On Sat, 02 Oct 2010, Luther Ma wrote:
I am still hoping that you would consider these issues, and of course, am hoping to one day see XJ Time in tzdata (and not just in the comments)
I read your message as "I like the change in principle, but I don't like the names". Could you suggest names that you think are better?
--apb (Alan Barrett)
Hi Paul, Thank you for your reply; I have included a few people in cc that are involved with the TimeZone database on the TomTom side. We do not have a reliable source on the Xinjiang timezone so it is probably best to keep it the way it is now. My remark was based on: "While you are visiting Xinjiang, it is important to be aware of the time zone being used. Although officially run on Beijing time, Xinjiang people also use their own system. If Beijing time is used it means that the sun doesn't raise until 9am and it is still light at midnight in the summer months." (from http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/xinjiang/)
From an internal discussion: "Our TomTom navigation engine uses the zoneinfo library and it doesn't have a record with a "Beijing" city name. We can add it ourselves, but we need to be aware that if we add "Asia/Beijing", we no longer use the official time zone name from zoneinfo and we can't use the zoneinfo lib anymore to find out time zone information from time zone name."
This is the main reason we would like to ask whether it is possible to add a Asia/Beijing entry to the database. Probably TZ='Asia/Beijing' will not work for us as we only use what is in the database. Best regards, Walter Korte -----Original Message----- From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU] Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 1:27 AM To: Walter Korte Cc: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: Re: FW: About China time zones
From: Walter Korte [mailto:Walter.Korte@tomtom.com] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:15
Neither Harbin, Shanghai nor Chungking (this is a very strange spelling, it is spelled Chongqing in Pinyin) is used in China to indicate a time zone.
This is the same as the US. People in the US also do not say "Denver" or "Chicago" to denote a time zone. City names like "Denver" (and "Harbin") are needed only for proper support of older time stamps, back when different regions of the country used different rules. China is similar. If users don't care about old time stamps, they can simply set TZ='Asia/Beijing'.
in practice Xinjiang uses its own time zone so keeping these would be better.
Ouch. The time zone database says that Xinjiang currently uses the same time zone as Beijing in practice. So anyone who sets TZ='Asia/Urumqi' will get Beijing time for current time stamps. Do you know of a reliable source on this topic?
On 09/26/2010 08:35 PM, Walter Korte wrote:
if we add "Asia/Beijing", we no longer use the official time zone name from zoneinfo and we can't use the zoneinfo lib anymore to find out time zone information from time zone name
My impression is that the vast majority of users in China wouldn't like to use the name 'Asia/Beijing'. They'd far prefer having a name like '北京' or '北京市' or '北京时间', and which of those names they'd prefer depends on linguistic factors well beyond my ken. It's a trivial matter for you to add whatever aliases you like for time zone names, on your own platform. Simply add "Link" commands to your copy of the tz database, as is already done in the "backward" file. For example: Link Asia/Shanghai 北京时间 and then your users can set TZ='北京时间'. (Again, this string is only my uninformed speculation! please consult a Chinese expert for the proper string to use.) Obviously this sort of thing is beyond the scope of the tz project, which focuses on the tz data itself and avoids localization. However, you may wish to consult the CLDR project <http://cldr.unicode.org/> which does contain localized names for tz regions. At the back of your request I detect misunderstanding of what the tz database labels are supposed to be. They are not supposed to be official names for anything, or to reflect common names for time zone regions. Long ago we tried doing it that way, with names like 'US/Pacific', and it didn't work, because it mishandled historical time stamps. Adding a tz name like 'Beijing' would lead to the same sort of errors that the old 'US/Pacific' name did. In your application these errors might be OK (which is why I suggested the 'Link' command above: it's bogus for old time stamps but most likely good enough for your needs) but in general they are not OK.
On Sep 26, 2010, at 9:18 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
At the back of your request I detect misunderstanding of what the tz database labels are supposed to be. They are not supposed to be official names for anything, or to reflect common names for time zone regions.
...and there is no requirement that a user interface for selecting a time zone use the TZ database label as a name; the only UI that would require that is the "UN*X environment variable, as set (by running zic -l, by editing some environment-variable-setting script)", because the TZ environment variable is set to a database label. A GUI for selecting a time zone can offer the user any names it wants for the choices.
participants (7)
-
Alan Barrett -
Guy Harris -
Luther Ma -
Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] -
Paul Eggert -
Paul Koning -
Walter Korte