[tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone

Lester Caine lester at lsces.co.uk
Fri Apr 3 19:51:38 UTC 2015


On 03/04/15 20:34, Matt Johnson wrote:
> Yes , but when you say "identifier", I think "Europe/Minsk", not "MSK". 
> Do you consider both to be identifying a rule set?

This is a debate we had on the tzdist workgroup. A rule set can be used
by many timezones, and as such is generic to the TZ database, not a
specific tz identifier. CET for example is used by numerous central
European identifiers, as are many of the American rule sets. In the
American example, states may switch between one rule set and another
over time resulting in a complex set of timezone data, but the rule set
itself does not change. Belarus is currently using the same rule set it
was using pre-1970? We do not need to duplicate that rule set and create
a new identifier for it ... we just use the generic rule set that works.

On the tzdist protocol every single identifier will have it's own
duplicate set of information, so the rule set base is not identified and
one can use any names one likes for what is essentially the same set of
data. If there is a change to one of the generic rule sets every data
set using it has to be pushed as an update, rather than just publishing
the one change of rules.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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