Proposal to the Paraguayan Government

[José Miguel Parrella Romero]

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Paul Koning escribió:

...

>> From: Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]

...

>> From: Carlos Raúl Perasso [crperasso at gmail.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:32 PM
>> To: olsona at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
>> Subject: Proposal to the Paraguayan Government
>>
>> Hi Olson...
>>
>>   I would like to know, considering the tz datebase update procedure
>> and the frequency at which mayor Linux distros, Java, Oracle and so on
>> replicate this updates, how many days do you think there should be
>> between a rule change and the next date it affects.

Carlos,

I lived the experience of the Venezuelan Gov't timezone change from
UTC-0400 to UTC-0430 in 2007, which gave us very few months to prepare a
new release of tzdata and then push it into the most used Linux distro
(Debian) in critical gov't infrastructure (such as the power utility
where I used to work)

I believe the Sun people responded on a timely fashion for Solaris, yet
I don't know how it might be at this moment while they merge.

Our Microsoft Windows team had a hard time, patch arrived very late for
them to simulate the time change (I assume they don't use Olson's DB any
way) and they had long downtimes.

Even if the Olson database is pushed on a timely manner, some vendors
will give you surprises. After this timezone change, a SCADA system
failed to report a switch in a substation. Because they mixed various
versions of PLCs, they found out some of them were up-to-date, some of
them were not and some of them didn't need a timezone change on the PLC
itself since they reported in UTC...

Such a decision is not to be taken lightly by any government (take into
account we're not used to yearly timezone changes such as DST in most of
the LatAm countries) nor it should be taken just with political basis.

After this 2007 change, both the Venezuelan gov't and political opposers
recommended to change the timezone again in order to save energy. In a
country where only the northernmost cities experience an under 1 hour
difference in daytime, year-round, moving the timezone again without
taking into account a DST measure (which would be unusual for our lat)
would be disastrous, some argue that it'd even lead to energy waste.

I wish you luck in your considerations for timezone changes in .py,

- --
José Miguel Parrella Romero (bureado.com.ve)          PGP: 0×88D4B7DF
Debian Developer                                Caracas, VE/Quito, EC
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