Proposed change for new U. S. law; also, what about Indiana?

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:25:41 -0400
> From: John Hawkinson <jhawk at MIT.EDU>
>
> [ I had originally sent a version of this on Tuesday morning, but it
> failed to go through because apparently lecserver.nci.nih.gov is still
> firewalled, and elsie works only because of an MX record. ]

Yes, things are still much messed up for me as well.  I am getting no
copies of email (I had to FTP the mail archive from elsie to see your
mail).  Also, the email headers get rewritten to be from
tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov, so when people reply to email their messages
do not get through.

Perhaps we should move the list elsewhere?  I can volunteer the GNU
email server <http://lists.gnu.org/>, if that would help.

> HR numbers are per-year (e.g. HR.6 of the 109th Congress), and are
> really only useful before bills become laws. I expect it will be
> assigned a Public Law number sometime this coming week, and that will
> appear at "http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR00006:@@@S".
> 
> Can we wait until then and include that number?

I wouldn't wait.  We can update the comment later.

> p.s.: I keep wondering if its a good time to propose changing the
> default name of US timezones to US/Eastern -style rather than
> America/New_York, because our timezones are set based on national
> policy

Unfortunately that's not quite true.  The daylight-saving rules are
national policy, but whether to adopt daylight-saving is decided more
locally.

(Speaking of which, what is the story on Indiana?
<http://www.perrycountynews.com/articles/2005/08/15/top_story/t1.txt>
says that Indiana will observe DST starting next year.  Is that really
true?)

Also, time zone boundaries move.  So, for example, US/Eastern is not
correct for Monticello, KY, as it will mishandle time stamps before
2000 (Monticello switched from Central to Eastern in fall 2000).

We will continue to support names like US/Eastern indefinitely, but
the location-based names are more accurate.