[tz] Missing entry for Heard Island and MacDonald Islands

Tobias Conradi tobias.conradi at gmail.com
Sat May 12 00:16:34 UTC 2012


> That rule, while understandable,
Is it?

tzcode2012b\Theory:
"However, uninhabited ISO 3166 regions like Bouvet Island do not need
locations, since local time is not defined there."

1) there is no definition of "uninhabited"
de WP reports a team of people has been there after the 1970-01-01
cutoff point:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvetinsel#cite_note-6
"Vom 24. Dezember 1978 bis zum 8. März 1979 hielt sich ein
norwegisches Forschungsteam auf der Insel auf und führte biologische
und geologische Forschungsarbeiten durch."

There are more sources supporting the claim that it had been populated.

2) a region does not "need" locations? I thought tz editors decide on
which location to use, but not on "need" of locations. Wikitravel
reports Olav Peak exists on Bouvet Island, without discussing a need
for the peak.

3) I doubt, that local time is not defined in a region only because
there is no population. It is defined for deserts in North America. If
there is no-one in my bathroom still, civil time is defined there.

Furthermore the file says
"Use UTC (with time zone abbreviation "zzz") for locations while uninhabited."

My flat gets UTC if I leave it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chamberlin_(Alaska)
on UTC most of the year?

What zone to use for Bouvet Island in February 1979 when it was
inhabited? Or was is not inhabited despite people living there?

> it would be easier for
> implementations if each country code
> mapped to at least one zone.
These country codes can be deleted, former ISO country codes are tracked in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-3#Current_codes

A zone may get deleted if it had been created only on the basis that
each country should get at least one zone. Imagine the Netherlands
Antilles revert their split and there have only been differences
before 1970. Then the pre-1970 data could become deleted.

Making it easier for implementations to map to ISO 3166 is a mapping issue.

The other issue is that clock time is defined for a region of the
earth (HM = UTC+5 according to timegenie), but the tzdb does not track
that, which violates Theory:

----- Scope of the tz database -----

The tz database attempts to record the history and predicted future of
all computer-based clocks that track civil time.  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).

-- 
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com/



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