FW: Chages in timezone for Sri Lanka

Paul Eggert eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU
Thu Mar 9 21:18:52 UTC 2006


> From: Petr Machata [mailto:pmachata at redhat.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 10:48 AM

> It was brought to my attention that Sri Lanka is going to change
> timezone from GMT+6:00 to GMT+5:30, quite soon at Apr/13:
>
> http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/001200603042035.htm
>
> Do you know anything closer, or anything that looks more "official"?

Sorry, I don't know of an official announcement.  But there are lots
of reports to this effect, so it looks like a done deal.  Thanks for
the heads-up.

A comment in the Acorn from someone who appears to be well-informed
<http://opinion.paifamily.com/?p=1854> says "The President's office
informed the public today that the clocks in Sri Lanka would revert
back to the old time i.e. Indian standard time from April 14, 2006
onwards. April 14 is the traditional Tamil/Sinhalese New Year (known
in India as Baisakhi), a major public holiday in the island.".  So my
guess is that the actual transition will occur at 00:00 on April 14
(i.e., April 13 at 24:00).  If anyone knows better, please let us
know.

Another commenter in the same forum speculates that the change came
about because "Mahinda Percy Rajapakse is very astrology conscious. So
perhaps his advisors had urged him to set the clock back to undo the
"damage" of the Chandrika era when the armed forces suffered several
setbacks at the hands of the LTTE in the battle field."



> Is there going to be new tzdata release?

I'll try to generate a proposed patch set in the next couple of days,
since this is relatively urgent.



More information about the tz mailing list