[tz] Uruguay out of DST

[Guy Harris]

On Jul 11, 2015, at 12:11 AM, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:

> Much of the discussion on the specification on tzdist was disagreements
> on just what format things would take. This is the perpetual problem
> with many of these 'standards' and I can go on for hours about the
> various 'quality' standards that have absolutely nothing to do with the
> quality of the finished product as Mr. Ratner can testify. It is the
> QUALITY of the underlying data which is the problem, not getting it out
> fast,

There are *several* problems, of which one is the difficulty of dealing with, sometimes on short notice, with a government changing DST rules on a schedule inconvenient both for the tzdb maintainers and the providers of software and equipment that uses the tzdb.  ("Hi, we, the government of Elbonia, have decided to switch our country's civil time, starting at the end of next week!")  That's the problem being discussed in this thread.

> and there is nothing in tzdist to address that problem. The debate
> on the missing historic data will go on ...
> 
> What we now need is a publisher who cleanly identifies just what range
> of tzdata it is providing and will use tzdist in a manor where some one
> like an international traveller switching on his mobile device after an
> 8 hour flight will be flagged that the time offset in the country they
> have just landed in has changed over night.

That's the job of the provider of the OS for the mobile device; it's not the job of the database publisher, if they're not the provider of that OS, to arrange that OS in question pop up a "Surprise!  The time changed overnight!" notification on the screen.

> While the tzdist mechanism can pass on that information,
> itt has no mechanism for either creating the data,

That's the tzdb maintainer's job.

> or handling the data once received.

That's the job of the software providers, including, but not necessarily limited to, the OS vendor (you might be using a third-party calendaring tool).