[tz] Large scale changes proposed in 2014f

[Stephen Colebourne]

I believe that the changes currently proposed are far far too
widespread and damaging.

I have taken the latest in the GitHub repo and expanded them out into
actual resolved results. The differences between 2014e and
2014f-proposed can be seen here:
https://github.com/jodastephen/tzdiff/commit/c812da9e12bd6f8aa52fa2dd758e236581c23a29

(other version differences available here:
https://github.com/jodastephen/tzdiff/commits/proposed-2014f)

As can be seen from the first link, the changes proposed are very
widespread. they include
- Africa/Accra gains DST between 1920 and 1935
- Africa/Freetown loses its entire history of DST
- Africa/Kampala has very different DST history
- Africa/Dar_es_Salaam has entirely different history before 1961
- Africa/Djibouti gains history before 1960
- Africa/Addis_Ababa has completely different history before 1960
- Africa/Asmara has completely different history before 1960
- Africa/Conakry loses history before 1960
- Africa/Banjul loses history before 1964
- Africa/Maseru gains DST history
- Africa/Mbabane gains DST history
- Africa/Mogadishu gains completely different DST history

and many others with more minor changes.

I'd also note that Ho_Chi_Minh, Kashgar, Saigon, Vientiane and
Phnom_Penh lose their entire history

The changes to Asia/Qatar and Asia/Kuwait look suspect.

Asia/Urumqi loses its entire history.

Indian/Antananarivo, Comoro and Mayotte get entirely different DST history.

Pacific/Midway, Pago_Pago, Saipan, Samoa get entirely different DST history.


The above is an attempt to summarise some but not all of the changes.
I am far from convinced that the scale of the proposed changes (far
bigger than even 2013e) have been anywhere near justified.

Is there consensus on the list that all of these changes are better
than what went before?

Stephen




On 16 July 2014 06:40, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Paul Eggert wrote:
>>
>> Alan Barrett wrote:
>>>
>>> To the best of my knowledge, most other African countries that share the
>>> same UTC offset do not use the abbreviation "SAST"
>>
>>
>> Thanks for catching this; this was indeed an error in the merge, and
>> I'll prepare a patch shortly that reverts to the previous behavior here
>> as well.
>
>
> By "most other African countries" I expect you meant the same set of
> countries that use "CAT" rather than "SAST" in Release 2014e.
>
> Anyway, the revised patch turned into more research than I expected, but I
> finally came up with the attached proposal.  This patch fixes the problem
> you noted, along with the other specific problems noted, though it does
> still turn some zones into links when there's no good evidence for the
> zones' differences.
>
> I hope I correctly puzzled out Google Translate's mangling of Hungarian for
> the fixes to Hungarian daylight saving time rules in 1918-1945. Oross's work
> has facsimiles of the original material!  If only our other sources were as
> meticulous....