[tz] Missing entry for Heard Island and MacDonald Islands

[Sergiusz Wolicki]

## What level of discussion is this?

Actually, a funny and intelligent answer from Paul.  True vacuum has no
atoms. As temperature is understood to be the measure of how much atoms
move relative to each other (or similar), it makes little sense to talk
about temperature where there are no atoms. Similarly, a long discussion
about a time zone for a place where there is nobody to look at a clock
seems futile. Small groups of temporary visitors do not count, because they
will observe whatever time they want to.  They may, for example, decide to
leave clocks at their home time zone, or set them as dictated by
geographical time or whatever.

On the other hand, if a governmental organization defines a time zone for
an area, like for HM or Siberia, then it makes sense to consider this time
zone as applying to the area.  The real question to answer is, if we want
the tz database to have a time zone for each ISO territory code or not. If
not, then UTC+5 is good enough. It is really waste of time to try to define
history of observed time for a generally inhabited island.  If yes, let's
add a time zone and define it as UTC+5 with no history.


-- S5sz



On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Tobias Conradi <tobias.conradi at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 2:13 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> > On 05/11/2012 03:36 PM, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> >> The historical practice of the maintainers up to this point has been
> >> that locations that are uninhabited do not get a zone.
> >
> > Yes, the idea is that the tz database attempts to record
> > common real-world practice at a location.
> >
> > Local time is
> > undefined if there are no locals.
> Any source for the claim? Vast areas of Siberia without local time?
>
> >  It's like trying to
> > define the temperature of a true vacuum.
> What level of discussion is this?
>
> http://www.timegenie.com/country.time/hm reports that the Australian
> Antarctic Division did succeed to define a time.
>
> > A  goal of the tz database design is to lessen the need
> > for arguments.  Omitting uninhabited locations is one
> > small way to further that goal.
> They are only omitted sometimes. This is inconsistent.
>
> --
> Tobias Conradi
> Rheinsberger Str. 18
> 10115 Berlin
> Germany
>
> http://tobiasconradi.com/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20120511/77ba382b/attachment.html