[tz] about DST in Europe

[David Carrara]

​​
Good day,
i'm writting to you about the file "europe" taken from tzdata-latest.tar.gz


I read in it :
«
# There shouldn't be any [current members who are not using EU rules].
# A Directive has the force of law, member states are obliged to enact
# national law to implement it. The only contentious issue was the
# different end date for the UK and Ireland, and this was always allowed
# in the Directive.
 »


But i think this is small imprecision.
in our European official documents there is a directive saying WHEN to
change
but i've never seen any directive saying we had to change (each country is
free).


The purpose of this directive is not to have everybody changing on his own
date.
It's easier with only one date, the same for all.
There is no real mistakes in the file, since every Member States is already
applying DST for now. So it sounds like it's the same.
But I think  these lines in the file maintain the imprecision.


Furthermore, the tzdata file says « only contentious issue was the
different end date for the UK and Ireland, and this was always allowed in
the Directive. »
But when I read the directive I see no exception about them. They don't
have same timezone, but —it's the purpose of my email— having same timezone
or not is not a part of the directive. So no exception is required about
them.

Neither about DST observance, each country can choose to have DST or not.

It's all only about the schedule, then UK and Ireland are applying their
DST at the same date we do (i'm in France). They change the same day at 1am
UTC. So they don't create any exception at all.  AND you can read this
directive (link below), there is no line about UK ;
source, European's  2000/84/CE directive ;
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2001:031:0021:0022:EN:PDF


The only one exception is this line
« shall not apply to the overseas territories of the Member States. »
(geographical reasons)

We also read in that directive that a 5 years-long schedule is made in
advance. That means if anything has to change we will have to tell in
advance.

Thank you

-- 
David C.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20150331/f65f0bee/attachment.html>