[tz] Crimea to switch to Moscow Time as of March 30, 2014

[lennox at cs.columbia.edu]

On Monday, March 17 2014, "Paul_Koning at Dell.com" wrote to "<lennox at cs.columbia.edu>, <eggert at cs.ucla.edu>, <tz at iana.org>" saying:

> 
> On Mar 17, 2014, at 12:16 PM, <lennox at cs.columbia.edu> <lennox at cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
> 
> > ...
> > The other, politically fraught, issue for the tzdb is going to be how to
> > mark Europe/Simferopol and any other new Crimean timezones in zone.tab,
> > i.e. whether they should keep being categorized as UA or changed to RU.  My
> > suggestion would be to leave them as UA until such time as Crimea's
> > accession to Russia is internationally recognized, or the situation
> > otherwise changes.
> 
> Though it pains me to say so, I don’t agree.  We’ve had a whole lot of debate on this list about whether TZ entries should have the blessing of some “authority”.  The current approach, I believe, is that it is intended to reflect the reality on the ground, and official blessing is not directly relevent.  That’s why there are (or were, or were planned to be) entries for places like Transnistria or Taiwan.

I absolutely agree that the entries for Europe/Simferopol should reflect
what people are actually doing to their clocks in Simferopol, regardless of
what the government in Kiev may think *should* be happening there.

The question I have is how it should be described in zone.tab.  This is more
fraught -- though, on reflection, I think I've changed my mind from my
initial position.  The question is, how would a Crimean user of tzselect
expect to find the entry for their local timezone?  And the answer probably
is, they would expect to find it by selecting "Russia", rather than
"Ukraine".

-- 
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs.columbia.edu