[tz] Merged 1970+ time zones should always return -1 pre-1970

Emily Crandall Fleischman emilycf at mit.edu
Wed Sep 29 19:18:22 UTC 2021


Originally, such merges (geographic / Etc) were in the proposed
mergers, but it was decided that this was a bad idea (since linking
geographic -> Etc makes the counterintuitive signs of the Etc/GMT
zones the "canonical" names of those zones, and linking Etc ->
geographic breaks the [technically out-of-scope, but still useful]
assumption that the Etc/GMT zones would always produce the same
offset.

See this email and preceding emails for the discussion that occurred:
https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-May/030136.html

Best,
Emily Crandall Fleischman

On Wed, 29 Sept 2021 at 15:07, Robert Elz via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>
>     Date:        Wed, 29 Sep 2021 10:08:04 -0700
>     From:        Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu>
>     Message-ID:  <701226da-b57c-1fa1-a33b-50522a0f6de0 at cs.ucla.edu>
>
>   | No, it is completely absurd. It's not how timezone rule changes work. No
>   | politician, no matter how amateur, would arrange to change the clocks
>   | merely because of Independence Day.
>
> I think that's a stretch.   It is certainly one thing that can be changed
> and would indicate that "things are different now" before any of the harder
> and more costly changes could be implemented.   Whether that happened or not
> I don't know - but I certainly don't simply write it off as absurd.
>
>   | It'd be a major political blunder if
>   | fiddling with the clocks is signaled as one of the most important things
>   | the new legislature or executive could do.
>
> I have seen no evidence of a claim like that, I would not be surprised
> to learn there were other issues considered considerably more important.
>
>   | That particular data entry must be wrong,
>
> Sorry, "must be" is not an argument that has any traction with
> me at all, no matter what the issue.   Unless you can show it is
> impossible (which clearly can't be done here, as it obviously would
> have been possible, regardless of how likely it might be considered)
> then only evidence of what actually happened will do.
>
> Clearly, unless the assertion is that Mali was never in the -01:00 zone,
> there had to be a change sometime, as it now isn't.
>
> Even if it turns out that it was a guess, and is wrong, that is no worse
> than the guess in the Honolulu zone is it?   Should that one be removed too?
>
>   | It differs from all other Zones in its combination of UT offsets and
>   | timezone abbreviations.
>
> Eliminating abbreviations is another task that's been undertaken with
> some abandon - Honolulu's could be changed to "-10" then it would (post 1970)
> be identical to Etc/GMT+10 and you'd have one less zone to manage.
>
> Furthermore, both those changes would surely be more fair and equitable?
>
> kre
>


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