Timezone translations

Peter Ilieve peter at aldie.co.uk
Mon Jun 6 08:07:10 UTC 2005


On 6 Jun 2005, at 01:23, Mark Davis wrote:

>> Finally, I'll repeat the question from my first mail about this,  
>> which
>> I forgot to add to my last mail: where did the current data for
>> Europe/London in the en_timezones.html come from?
>>
>
> I would have to wade back through all the checkins to see where it  
> came
> from. Frankly, since it looks like it is wrong anyway, it is not a
> particularly good use of time.

I disagree. There is a set of slides (in PowerPoint format, so much  
for open
standards) giving an overview of CLDR linked from <http:// 
www.unicode.org/cldr/>.
Slides 14 and 15 describe a vetting process, which strongly encourages
references to external sources and mentions consultation with contacts
in the countries concerned. How did this completely bogus Europe/London
data for English get through that process?

It looks to me as though someone just took the data for America/New_York
and did s/Eastern/British/g;s/E/B/g. That's the simplest explanation of
how it ended up with BT and BDT, terms never used in the UK, and with  
BST
as the term for the wrong sort of time. Can you demonstrate otherwise?

If I find that the tiny subset of CLDR data that I know about is so
wrong why should I trust any of the rest of it without some explanation
of why the bit I know about is wrong?


         Peter Ilieve        peter at aldie.co.uk




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