[tz] Turkey delays winter time

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Sun Sep 20 19:14:46 UTC 2015


Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
> It seems reasonable to me to release a TZ update as soon as there’s confirmation that the change is correct

Sometimes even after we have confirmation, a government changes its mind and 
un-confirms.

And in the more usual case where a government stands pat, there is an advantage 
to batching changes rather than generating a new tzdata release for each 
individual change. Doing the latter would have doubled the number of tzdata 
releases this year. There is a cost to making tzdata releases, and we shouldn't 
inflict that cost on everybody merely because some organizations' release 
processes are so slow that they'll have problems no matter what tzdata does.

The situation in Turkey is strange. It seems that the news was reported in a 
major Turkish newpaper on September 8. Only yesterday were we informed. As far 
as we know, there's been no government announcement. The last time Turkey tried 
this sort of thing, it didn't take: only parts of the government observed the 
official time, and civil society (e.g., airlines) ignored the change. It's not 
clear what will happen this time, even if we get confirmation from some agency 
of the Turkish government. Quite possibly Apple and the tzdata project will get 
complaints no matter what we do. Let the fingerpointing begin!


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