[tz] 1 s error in America/Adak and America/Nome

Michael Deckers michael.h.deckers at googlemail.com
Wed Jun 14 07:17:21 UTC 2017


    On 2017-06-12 16:17, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Michael H Deckers wrote:

> >        •  assumptions that the day of the week was set back from Saturday
> >           to Friday at 15:30 or at 15:33:32 local time
> 
> I don't think that's how things happened. Rousseau documents his expedition 
> purely from an American timekeeping point of view, and I have little doubt that 
> the Americans in Sitka kept American time throughout. So in practice, Sitka had 
> overlapping time zones (much like Ürümqi today) for at least a day or two. We 
> don't want to create a new time zone entry just for this problem: we need a 
> single point of transition. The best single point I can think of is the 15:30 
> time of the Ossipee's salute.


    Nobody can argue with that (;-)).

    The proposed change would make civil time at Sitka switch
    from Saturday, 1867-10-19 15:30 to Friday, 1867-10-18 15:30.
    If that is not how things have happened then the proposal
    should, in my humble opinion, be changed to something that
    could have happened, even if it becomes less interesting
    culturally.

    Is "kept American time" supposed to imply that Americans
    in Sitka did not use the same days of the week as the
    Russians? That would be hard to believe and certainly
    would need some evidence.

    What we do have evidence for is that the Russian Church
    in Alaska tried to keep the old time scale for liturgical
    purposes. See eg
       Ian R Bartky: "One Time Fits All: The Campaigns
       for Global Uniformity". 2007.
       partly on line at
       [https://books.google.de/books/about
        /One_Time_Fits_All.html?id=rC6sAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y]
    page 26. But of course, that happened after the switch
    in question, not before it, and it does not concern civil
    time, the subject of tzdb.

    Michael Deckers.

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