[tz] Last weekend's daylight-saving confusion in Morocco

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Thu Oct 1 22:09:16 UTC 2015


Thomas Savage reports confusion in Morocco last weekend involving 
daylight saving time.  See:

Savage T. Quelle heure est-il vraiment au Maroc? Telquel.ma 2015-09-30. 
http://telquel.ma/2015/09/30/quelle-heure-il-vraiment-au-maroc_1464578

Savage quotes last month's confusion on the tz mailing list over whether 
Morocco's fallback transition this year would be Sept. 27 (as an 
incorrect news report would have it) or Oct. 25 (the official date), and 
speculates that this confusion led to many electronic devices in Morocco 
to misbehave on Sept. 27.  In thinking about the failure symptoms, 
though, I guess a more plausible explanation is that the malfunctioning 
devices were using the equivalent of a tz release somewhere from tzdata 
2012c (dated 2012-03-07) through 2013g (dated 2013-09-30), as these 
older releases predicted that Morocco would fall back the last Sunday in 
September -- a prediction that was correct in 2012 but incorrect in 2013 
through 2015.


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