South Australia fools around withi its timezone again

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        19 Sep 1994 10:15:05 -0700
    From:        eggert at twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
    Message-ID:  <9409191715.AA28923 at spot.twinsun.com>

    Date:        Mon, 19 Sep 1994 12:17:09 +0930
    From:        Mark Prior <mrp at itd.adelaide.edu.au>
    
    Rule    AS      1995    only    -       Mar     26      2:00    0    -
    
    Is that `2:00' or `3:00'?  According to the latest tz tables,
    since 1945 every Australian jurisdiction has used 3:00 for the
    fall switchover if it used DST at all.

It would be the autumn switchover, we don't have a "fall"...
(what's more, almost no, if any, Australian flora is actually
deciduous, so its not just a difference in terminology... Nothing
native falls in autumn except rain & the temperature!)

More seriously, it is, and always has been 02:00 when the switchover
occurs, its just that it's 02:00 standard time, not 02:00 wallclock
time (so its 03:00 summer time that reverts to 02:00 standard time).
In the tz files, that's written as 03:00.

At least, that is very explicitly what is in the Victorian
legislation, I can't really imagine that its different in the other
states, but I can imagine that the legislators don't really think
it matters what happens around 02:00 on a Sunday morning, and
could have done anything at all.

This is also true (to my knowledge) only with respect to the
current series of DST (since about 1970) - what happened back in
the 40's, or whenever DST previously applied, I have absolutely
no idea whatever, it could have been either way.

kre

ps: to those "unix-admins" at Adelaide Univ who have no idea
why they're getting this mail ... nor do I, Mark just included
you on the first message.  However you are probably going to have
to edit your timezone files sometime between now and next Morch.
So are all the rest of us.