[tz] Please Don't Feed the Trolls (was Kyiv not Kiev)

[Guy Harris]

On Jun 30, 2022, at 3:11 AM, Petro Ord <petro.ordyn at gmail.com> wrote:

> It seems that "If boundaries between regions are fluid, such as during
> a war or insurrection, do not bother to create a new timezone merely
> because of yet another boundary change." does not apply to russia.

Please indicate what new time zone was created as a result of either the 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea, the breakaway movement in the Donetsk and Luhansk areas, or the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Crimea was represented by the Europe/Simferopol region; that region was *changed*, but no new timezone (time zone database region) was created.  No new region was created for Donetsk and Luhansk.

>> What affect has the resolution had on the time to which Crimean residents set
>> their watches and that Crimean residents expect their mobile phones/computing devices to display?
> This is the response to "When Ukraine successfully reclaims the
> occupied territory", not only Ukraine reclaimed the occupied territory
> but also the rest of the world did.

If "claim" here means "claim that the occupied territory belongs to Ukraine", nothing has been "reclaimed" by Ukraine - before the Russian occupation, Ukraine claimed Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, and they still claim it.

However, "reclaim" here means to reestablish control over the occupied territory; Ukraine has not, as far as I know, pushed the Russian occupiers out of those regions and established effective control over those regions, so I suspect that most residents of Crimea keep clocks that don't use the time zone database set to Moscow time, and would thus find it inconvenient if the time kept by devices that use the time zone database (most smartphones and some personal computers) match that setting.

If that's not the case, please let us know.

If that *is* the case, then that means that the reality in Crimea is that most users are keeping Moscow time, the fact that this time zone setting was imposed by the Russian government rather than by the government recognized by Ukraine and the UN as the legitimate government of Crimea notwithstanding.

Note that there are a number of other cases in the time zone database where time changes imposed by occupying powers are reflected in the time zone database (World War II occupations by the Axis powers and occupation of the West Bank by Israel, for example).

>> Because that's not a change that affects time conversion.
>> It's like the change from Asia/Calcutta to Asia/Kolkata;
> Kyiv is not the name change. You don't have time for Kyiv in the tz databse.

So are you saying that a Zone entry with the following values for STDOFF, RULES, FORMAT and, except for the last line, UNTIL (the last line doesn't have an UNTIL value, as there is no known upcoming change to the rules):

			2:02:04 -	LMT	1880
			2:02:04	-	KMT	1924 May  2
			2:00	-	EET	1930 Jun 21
			3:00	-	MSK	1941 Sep 20
			1:00	C-Eur	CE%sT	1943 Nov  6
			3:00	Russia	MSK/MSD	1990 Jul  1  2:00
			2:00	1:00	EEST	1991 Sep 29  3:00
			2:00	C-Eur	EE%sT	1996 May 13
			2:00	EU	EE%sT

does not correctly describe the time in Kyiv and the tzdb region in which Kyiv is the largest city (at least for 1930-06-21 and later)?

If so, which lines are incorrect?

Those values appear in the Zone entry for that tzdb in both the current tzdata2022a version of the database and in the current Git repository version.

The one difference between the Zone entry containing those lines in the current tzdata2022a version of the database and the current Git repository version of the database is the name given to the region.  The version in tzdata2022a uses, in the name for that region, the name primarily used in English for its largest city in the region at one time; the version in the Git repository uses, in the name for that region, the name now primarily used in English for the largest city in the region.

So if the values shown above correctly describe the time in that region, there is an entry in the current version of the tz database for that region, and thus we *do* have time for Kyiv in the tz database, it just happens to use, as the name for that region, an out-of-date English name for its largest city.

That's the same as was the case for the time zone database entry for the region in which Kolkata is the largest city - before the 2008 change, the name for that region used an old English-language name for the city that didn't reflect the city's name changing in 2000/2001, and, after that change, the name for that region used an English-language name that reflected the new name.