FW: Timezone file asia

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Nimal Ratnayake [mailto:nimalr at pdn.ac.lk] 
> Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 2:00 AM
>
> the time change was effective from April 15 0:30.

Thanks; the latest tz data (2006d) contains that change.

> the text field is set to IST.  I think this needs to be corrected to LKT.

It was "IST" from 1906 (when Colombo switched from Moratuwa Mean Time
to India time) through 1996 (when Colombo switched away from India
time), so I thought it more consistent to revert back to the old
abbreviation.

But perhaps this isn't correct.  What do English-speaking people
typically say when they want to talk about the time zone used in
Colombo nowadays?  If they say "Sri Lanka time" then LKT would be more
appropriate.

One possibility is that we wait for a bit for the dust to settle down
and then see what people actually say in practice.


While we're on the subject of Sri Lanka time, Peter Apps and Ranga
Sirilal reported on April 12 that the Tamil Tigers "never accepted the
original 1996 time change and simply kept their clocks set five and a
half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), in line with neighbor
India."  See
<http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-04-12T172228Z_01_COL295762_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-SRILANKA-TIME-DC.XML>.
They also report that Buddhist temples and astrologers' offices stuck
with India time, but that's of less importance to us, since we focus
on civil time.

As luck would have it, though, people who live in regions under Tamil
control (or who live in Buddhist temples etc.) can simply use
TZ='Asia/Calcutta', as that zone has been correct for these regions
since our cutoff date of 1970.  However, I suppose I should add a
comment to this effect in the Sri Lanka part of the database.