daylight-saving time in Sri Lanka

[Paul Eggert]

In hindsight there was some warning that Sri Lanka might adopt
daylight-saving time.  In March the Sri Lanka _Sunday Observer_
reported that the government was considering it; see
<URL:http://www.lanka.net/lakehouse/anclweb/observr/week5/hotnews/31hot01.html>
(1996-03-31).  The motivation: Sri Lanka's hydro reservoirs, the
source of much of its electrical power, are quite low this year.

And last month roshan at lankacom.net asked in
<URL:news:31C7D974.41C6 at lankacom.net> (1996-06-19) how to change an
AIX host's time zone to GMT+0630.  LankaCom is a new ISP, a joint
venture between Singapore Telecom International and the Capital
Development and Investment Co Ltd of Sri Lanka.  I asked roshan ``why
+0630?'', but got no response.

I've emailed questions for more details about the change to the Sri
Lankan embassy in Washington DC, and to Sri Lanka Telecom; I've also
posted a query in soc.culture.sri-lanka and comp.std.misc.  If we
don't hear more details about the change, I propose that we assume
that Sri Lanka changed clocks at 1996-07-21 02:00 and that they'll
continue to use daylight-saving time until further notice (I'll
include this in a proposed patch that I'm preparing).  This assumption
could well be incorrect, but it should be less incorrect than the
current tz database.