[tz] draft of change summary for next tz release

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Wed Sep 18 14:58:36 UTC 2013


Wallace, Malcolm wrote:
> No attempt was made to show whether Liechtenstein
> follows the timezone rules for neighbouring Switzerland

Actually I made the attempt, and came up empty.
And it wasn't a casual attempt: I scoured the literature,
both online and in paper, in both English and German,
in the best research library in southern California.
Of course I may have missed something, and the National
Library of Liechtenstein would probably be a better
library for this; but I did try.

Alois Treindl wrote:
> Vaduz (Liechtenstein) is a different country, with a
> different timezone history: no DST in 1941 and 1942.

I'm sorry, but there is no real evidence to support
this claim, and I doubt that it's true.  Shanks doesn't
count as evidence, as he just makes things up.  The Swiss
astrology books don't count either, as they just make things
up too -- my recent research proved them to be inventions
even for *Switzerland*, so why should we pay attention
to them for a neighboring country?

Perhaps in the future someone will report good evidence
for Liechtenstein.  If that happens we can put a Zone entry
for Vaduz into the database instead of merely having a Link.
In the meantime, "We guess it's like Switzerland" is better
than what was in the tz database before.  (I suspect that
"it's like Switzerland" is all that the astrologers guessed
too, it's just that they were sloppier about it.)

It's not just Liechtenstein.  Similar issues afflict
several other places in the tz database, some fixed
already in 2013d, some fixed by the proposed changes, and
others still awaiting work.  I'm not talking merely about
entries that are poorly sourced.  I'm talking about entries
that (given what we know now) are likely wrong.


More information about the tz mailing list