[tz] Bugs in Russia - Seven month past since 2011-09-17 - still not fixed

[Robert Elz]

I received a copy of this message via private mail, not copied to
the list - and replied (as below) - then I saw another copy of the
message was sent to the list, so I am forwarding my reply to the list
as well...

    Date:        Wed, 2 May 2012 16:42:58 +0200
    From:        Tobias Conradi <mail.2012 at tobiasconradi.com>
    Message-ID:  <CAAGevbUqw308pGi7bYYNeZrwwvwtinqqskvW0Jv8aTOcESzMnA at mai=
l.gmail.com>

  | Suggested new zone:
  | Asia/Barnaul, split from Asia/Omsk

But why?  What's different about the zones, aside from their names?

  | Moves to Omsk Time

That tells me nothing.

  | FIX: oblast should be Republic.

Do you mean that we should change the word we use?   Could you
explain why (and it would be better on the list than in private mail to m=
e).

  | > that isn't "making up new rules on the fly"
  | If not on the fly, it should be specified in the Theory file, so that=

  | contributors are warned that their fixes may not be added for 7+
  | months if they don't affect current time stamps.

No, that's not why the changes you want didn't get made - it is because
no-one understands what was supposed to be changed, or why.

It might be obvious to you, it isn't to anyone else.

  | I think you are misinformed here. E.g. for
  | "Zone Asia/Omsk" it says in tzdata2012c\europe
  | #... [This region consists of]
  | # Respublika Altaj, Altajskij kraj, Omskaya oblast'.

Sure, we attempt to indicate what region the zone applies in, and
we will fix bugs in that if we understand what the bug is, but the
purpose of the project isn't to make those mappings, that's one of
the frills - we collect that data more so we know that we have all
of the needed zones, not so the region data can be used for anything
very useful.

If that's allowed you to find a missing zone, that's great, but we can't
just make a new zone with no data in it, we need to know what to put
there, and it needs to be different from the existing zones, we avoid
making duplicates (within a country).

kre