[tz] Ethiopia local time

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Fri Oct 5 01:15:11 UTC 2018


On 10/4/18 3:13 PM, Tim Parenti wrote:
>       Gregorian calendar</a> with days containing 24 equal-length hours
> -    numbered 00 through 23, except when clock transitions occur.
> +    numbered 00 through 23 beginning with midnight, except when clock
> +    transitions occur.

I'm afraid I'm not seeing what the "beginning with midnight" buys us. It 
already should be clear from the existing text that the hours in the day 
are numbered 00, 01, 02, ..., 23, so that 00 is the first hour of the 
calendar day and 23 is the last.

Ethiopia time is out of our scope not so much because we can't represent 
current practice in many Addis Ababa businesses (we can), but because 
it's an independent feature that POSIX and/or tzdb is not set up to 
model. One can use so-called Ethiopian timekeeping in any timezone; 
should we set up an Ethiopian variant for every current tzdb identifier, 
for the benefit of Ethopians sojourning in other locations? And should 
we do something similar for Arab time, and other timekeeping practices? 
Surely not; it's better if these timekeeping practices are treated 
independently of tzdb proper and are handled by code and/or locales 
designed for them, as an axis independent of what tzdb supplies.



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