[tz] [PATCH 3/3] * europe (Europe/Vaduz): Now a link to Europe/Zurich.

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Tue Sep 10 00:00:01 UTC 2013


On Sep 9, 2013, at 4:13 PM, David Patte ₯ <dpatte at relativedata.com> wrote:

> I actually don't use the LMT value in tz, so I am not personally concerned if it is lost, but I do use the date and time that the city moved from LMT, which would be a shame to lose.

Clive is suggesting losing the LMT values (which are redundant with an indication of the longitude of the city whose name appears in the tzid):

>> The LMT figures are nonsense, since they apply only to a narrow stripe
>> within each zone. I'd like to see them all removed.

and

>> But don't put LMT values in the files; remove the ones that are there.

and suggesting, as you are, *NOT* losing the date and time that the region covered by the tzid went to some form of "standard time" or "zonal time":

>> Rather, we should have markers of when zonal times, as opposed to LMT,
>> first came into effect. For places where we know the legal change point,
>> such as the UK, this is a "happened at" date-time. For places where we
>> don't, it's a "happened sometime before" date-time, and we probably want a
>> way to distinguish these.

Now, whether that's "the city" or "the region covered by the tzid" is another matter; what should we do if a given locale covered by a tzid didn't all adopt (in some sense) zonal time all at once?  Use the date and time the city designated by the tzid did?  Use the date and time that the last location in that region did?  Split the region into multiple regions, each of which adopted zonal time all at once (most of the shiny new tzids for the shiny new regions will presumably disappear if a customer of the tzdb winnows it down)?

Also, what sense of "adopt" should we, well, *adopt*?  "Adopted by a government for a region that includes all of the region in question" (which needn't always be a national government), or should we include common use (for which it might be more difficult to choose a date and time)?


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