[tz] Ethiopia local time

[admin at afocha.com]

> When does the date change? In the middle of the night or around
dawn?

The new day begins when the hour strikes 6:00 AM EAT, or 12:00 local
time. From my preliminary research, the same method of conveying date
and time is used in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, but not Somaliland
and Djibouti.

> Then, if we say Ethiopia is UTC-3, then clocks that automatically
follow tz database would be shifted 6 hours, and thus when local
people say it is 6 o'clock in local languages, the clock would display
as 
🕕 instead. However it would seems like it would confuse people, as
according to the description, people who use watches and speak local
language in that part of the world are still setting their clock to
the UTC+3 timezone.

I believe the locals do this to conform to the international standard
and the lack of formal recognition of the local system for tracking
the transition of days and time.  I am not sure about other
countries, but in Ethiopia, this system is not just a colloquial
detail, but a working system that is poorly managed by software.  I
think the likelihood of a localization pack addressing this for
multiple software products is highly unlikely.  

> 
 As opposed to the division AM/PM, there are time periods that need
to be used ( see 
https://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/8473 [1] ) such as "
ከሰዓት - afternoon - 6:01 to 11:59 Ethiopic = 12:01 to 17:59
Gregorian"  which need to be calculated based on local
timezone-adjusted time. If the time zone were skewed by 6 hours then
the period would be off.

An AM/PM designation would still work in that it is straight forward
and would get adopted as a compromise.  I will contact the Ministry
of Science and Technology to get their thoughts on the subject.

Regards,

Khalid

----- Original Message -----
From:
 "Steve Allen" <sla at ucolick.org>

 On Wed 2018-09-12T16:20:53-0700 Guy Harris hath writ:
 > int tm_hour; /* hours since midnight — [0 23] */

 > This means that tm_hour has to be 0 at midnight

 I think this means that the hour has to be 0 when the calendar date
changes.

 The meaning is the number of hours since the change of the calendar
 date, and in the usage prescribed by the 1884 International Meridian
 Conference that has been midnight. If the Ethiopian common use of
 time and date has the calendar change at sunrise or sunset then the
 POSIX requirements are satisfied.

 --
 Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS)
 UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat
+36.99855
 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015
 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m



Links:
------
[1] https://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/8473

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/attachments/20180913/c1532acd/attachment.html>