[tz] State of Palestine Time zone - need to update

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at SystematicSw.ab.ca
Sun Oct 25 16:16:49 UTC 2020


On 2020-10-25 01:55, heba.hamad at mtit.gov.ps wrote:
> .I’m Heba Hamad .I have been appointed as a focal point by the Ministry of telecommunication and information technology (state of Palestine) to communicate with you
> 
> I’m contacting you in regard to the time zone data base the field related to the state of Palestine. I checked the published data regarding the time zones related to Palestine and noticed that it’s not accurate, and hence I would like to ask for an update to the time zone data base related to Palestine to be as follow 
> 
> *  PS   State of Palestine  _Asia/AlQuds_       UTC +2:00 *

I'm a poster to this list with no official position.

Asia/Jerusalem is the time zone identifier (all are English) for what is called
in Arabic (transliterated to English) al-Quds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem, which shows it currently observing
gmtoff 7200 UTC+0200:

$ zdump Asia/Jerusalem
Asia/Jerusalem  Thu Mar 26 23:59:59 2020 UT = Fri Mar 27 01:59:59 2020 IST
isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Jerusalem  Fri Mar 27 00:00:00 2020 UT = Fri Mar 27 03:00:00 2020 IDT
isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Jerusalem  Sat Oct 24 22:59:59 2020 UT = Sun Oct 25 01:59:59 2020 IDT
isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Jerusalem  Sat Oct 24 23:00:00 2020 UT = Sun Oct 25 01:00:00 2020 IST
isdst=0 gmtoff=7200

If the information is not up to date, please contact your system or software
provider.
Also please consider the (lack of adequate lead time in any) notice given by
politicians and bureaucrats, and the weeks and months it takes for changes to be
published here, then pass through organizations' own bureacratic quality
assurance/quality control, testing, publishing, deployment, and distribution
processes.
Sometimes this goes through many stages as in mobile phones: to the software
vendor e.g. Google, Huawei, Apple, etc.; then to the handset vendor e.g Samsung,
Apple, Huawei, etc.; then to the mobile telephone companies in each region,
which send the updates to each vendors handsets on their networks.
Any of these may decide that they don't have enough sales in recent years in
that region to bother putting any priority on a prompt change, and wait for
another that affects more of their recent customers.

Arabic/Palestinian software is free to label that English time zone identifier
using e.g. Unicode/ICU/CLDR mappings:

	http://site.icu-project.org/design/formatting/timezone/getdisplayname

and where that mapping is not done, that is an indavisable and regrettable
omission by the software project or software developer (see "theory" below).

If you wish the list to consider changes to a time zone, please read previous
posts to the list about the zone in question, the comments with the data in the
file containing the zone in question, and
https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html to understand the scope,
principles, and *pragmatics* followed.
Please provide links to official government documents on official government web
sites, or links to respected primary or secondary sources which provide detailed
information about practices in effect in a zone, or quotations and citations for
them from widely available respected primary or secondary published sources,
preferably in English.

And as complained about in many posts on this list by all major software
vendors, please provide a year or at least many months notice of any proposed
changes, to allow changes to be officially published here, then be downloaded
and passed through downstream companies and organizations

[Please note that this list provides technical information according to the
situation in effect on the ground in a territory, and avoids all political
situations and stances. The alternatives are to omit providing any information
for disputed zones or locations, which helps no-one in those zones using
compuerized information systems, or to relabel all zones with some numerically
derived identifiers, forcing all participants to look up mappings to perform any
interpretation, greatly reducing any possible participation to those with the
capability of comprehending those mappings, and could only be accomplished over
a transition time of years to allow downstream consumers time to upgrade their
systems to handle the mappings.]

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains
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