[tz] Politics of TZ changes

[Brian Inglis]

On 2014-05-19 08:18, Paul_Koning at dell.com wrote:

> On May 18, 2014, at 10:35 AM, Arthur David Olson <arthurdavidolson at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Fact finding is part of encouraging governments to do the right
>> thing about changing daylight saving.
>> This week Paul Eggert noted how changes propagated to a system
>> within a day of being released.
>> That's the best case. What's the worst case?

> For embedded systems with long QA cycles, it could easily be a year.

For enterprise systems, likely to be quarterly desktop core system
patching, and quarterly to annual server core system patching.

>> And: what's best practice?
> The most recent change to US DST was the Energy Policy Act of 2005;
> it was signed into law on 2005-08-08; the first change resulting
> from the law was 2007-03-11, meaning there was more than 18 months
> of advance notice. Has there been a longer lead time?
> Has any government gotten closer to a zero lead time than Egypt?

For 2007 North American change, some Canadian provinces did not
enact a law until pretty close to the initial cutover.

> I distinctly remember some years ago a change that had negative lead time.
> Another with lead time measured in minutes.

Anyone with access to a tz repository having historical commit
timestamps could compare those against the zone/rule change
date/times in patches to come up with min/max lead times.
-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis