[tz] permanent DST and North American time zone names

Brooks Harris brooks at edlmax.com
Wed Mar 16 15:57:46 UTC 2022


On 2022-03-16 11:44 AM, Fred Gleason via tz wrote:
> On Mar 16, 2022, at 11:16, Tim Parenti via tz <tz at iana.org 
> <mailto:tz at iana.org>> wrote:
>
>> Complicating matters somewhat is that, because of the prevalence of 
>> tzdb, in a sense we're "victims of our own success".  That is, 
>> whatever we end up picking will likely show up fairly automatically 
>> in a lot of public-facing places, and so even if it isn't what the 
>> public would've naturally used in the immediate aftermath of a 
>> change, many will be fairly quickly informed by what they start to 
>> see, and may start adopting and spreading whatever nomenclature we've 
>> picked.
>
> With that in mind, I’m thinking that the best approach might be (to 
> take a page from the Hippocratic Oath) to “do no harm”. Given that the 
> overall thrust of the Bill is ‘permanent DST’, perhaps we should 
> reflect just that —i.e. the “permanent” abbreviations would become EDT 
> | CDT | MDT | PDT, the 'tm_isdst' member of the 'tm' struct would 
> always return a positive value, etc.
This is what happened in America/New_York in 1942, except the 
abbreviations were EWT and EPT, right?

Rule    US    1918    1919    -    Oct    lastSun    2:00    0    S
Rule    US    1942    only    -    Feb    9    2:00    1:00    W # War
Rule    US    1945    only    -    Aug    14    23:00u    1:00    P # Peace
Rule    US    1945    only    -    Sep    30    2:00    0    S

-880218001 1942-02-09 01:59:59 EST isdst 0 gmtoff -18000 stdoff -18000
-880218000 1942-02-09 03:00:00 EWT isdst 1 gmtoff -14400 stdoff -18000

-769395601 1945-08-14 18:59:59 EWT isdst 1 gmtoff -14400 stdoff -18000
-769395600 1945-08-14 19:00:00 EPT isdst 1 gmtoff -14400 stdoff -18000

-765396001 1945-09-30 01:59:59 EPT isdst 1 gmtoff -14400 stdoff -18000
-765396000 1945-09-30 01:00:00 EST isdst 0 gmtoff -18000 stdoff -18000

-Brooks
>
> Doing this would narrowly confine the scope of the changes to DST 
> transition handling itself; without the need to go change the meanings 
> of abbreviations as defined in the relevant RFCs and other standards 
> with the concomitant needed changes in downstream applications.
>
> Cheers!
>
>
> |---------------------------------------------------------------------|
> | Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |       Chief Developer             |
> |                           |       Paravel Systems             |
> |---------------------------------------------------------------------|
> |         A room without books is like a body without a soul.         |
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