[tz] Bugs in Russia - Seven month past since 2011-09-17 - still not fixed

[Tobias Conradi]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Robert Elz <kre at munnari.oz.au> wrote:
> I received a copy of this message via private mail, not copied to
> the list - and replied (as below) - then I saw another copy of the
> message was sent to the list, so I am forwarding my reply to the list
> as well...
Yes, I made a mistake, sorry.


>  | Suggested new zone:
>  | Asia/Barnaul, split from Asia/Omsk
>
> But why?  What's different about the zones, aside from their names?
The observed offsets from UTC after 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC which is
specified in the Theory file as a requirement for the establishment of
a new tz zone.

>  | Moves to Omsk Time
>
> That tells me nothing.
>
>  | FIX: oblast should be Republic.
>
> Do you mean that we should change the word we use?   Could you
> explain why (and it would be better on the list than in private mail to m=
> e).
I don't know who is "we". But I only meant to fix my wrong proposal
which mentions Altai Oblast. I am not aware of any other place where
this term has been used.

>  | > that isn't "making up new rules on the fly"
>  | If not on the fly, it should be specified in the Theory file, so that=
>
>  | contributors are warned that their fixes may not be added for 7+
>  | months if they don't affect current time stamps.
>
> No, that's not why the changes you want didn't get made - it is because
> no-one understands what was supposed to be changed, or why.
Sure?

> It might be obvious to you, it isn't to anyone else.
Any prove for this claim?

But maybe you mean it would be Robert Elz's approach of handling
things. Not asking if Robert Elz doesn't understand a fix, but simply
ignore.

>  | I think you are misinformed here. E.g. for
>  | "Zone Asia/Omsk" it says in tzdata2012c\europe
>  | #... [This region consists of]
>  | # Respublika Altaj, Altajskij kraj, Omskaya oblast'.
>
> Sure, we attempt to indicate what region the zone applies in, and
> we will fix bugs in that if we understand what the bug is,
Again I don't know who is "we". I only care about the tzdb and hope
the maintainers apply fixes. And I hope they are clever enough to
understand bug reports. Honestly I doubt someone who does not know
what "Omsk Time" is and does  indicate that he wouldn't ask if he
doesn't understand a bug report is a good fit if there would be only
one maintainer.

> but the
> purpose of the project isn't to make those mappings,
Not sure which project you talk about. I am referring to the tzdb
hosted at http://www.iana.org/time-zones

Theory file:
---------------------
Scope of the tz database
...To represent this
data, the world is partitioned into regions whose clocks all agree
about time stamps that occur after the somewhat-arbitrary cutoff point
of the POSIX Epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC).....
------------------------
I take "world" as planet Earth.


> that's one of
> the frills - we collect that data more so we know that we have all
> of the needed zones, not so the region data can be used for anything
> very useful.
Again I don't know who is we. I personally can use the IANA tzdb
region data for a lot of useful things.


-- 
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com/