[tz] Lebanon DST change internally disputed

[Brian Inglis]

Lebanese news confuses DST for UTC:

https://www.lbcgroup.tv/news/news-bulletin-reports/693995/lebanons-daylight-saving-time-change-defies-global/en 
;^>

NTP syncs systems to keep UTC time accurately.
DST just bumps the local Standard Time offset *from UTC* by an extra hour.

As Egypt was fined US$8M by IATA in 2016 for inadequate notice of DST change 
affecting flight schedules, hopefully Lebanon will see a bill for double that!

Someone should ensure that the bill goes to the person of the Prime Minister who 
made the stupid decision, whose impact he did not understand, and obviously and 
arrogantly made no effort to ask anyone with any background, knowledge, or 
responsibility.

[I'm greatly in favour of laws making all business and government leaders 
responsible civilly, criminally, and financially for negative impacts of their 
decisions! The rest of us are: why should they get a free pass?]

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis              Calgary, Alberta, Canada

La perfection est atteinte                   Perfection is achieved
non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter  not when there is no more to add
mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer     but when there is no more to cut
                                 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


On 2023-03-25 16:20, Rany Hany via tz wrote:
> I've simply set the timezone to Etc/GMT+2 in the meantime. It should work fine 
> in the interim. The only thing I worry about is the following scenario:
> 
>   * User sets their timezone to Asia/Beirut on old tzinfo which thinks its DST time
>   * Disables NTP and manually sets the time without DST offset
>   * All other calendars/etc is messed up and off by one hour
> 
> This is made worse by the fact that Alfa and Touch (only telecom providers) 
> recommended their customers to just manually set the time instead of adjusting 
> the UTC offset... All around terrible situation compounded by poor advise from 
> these companies :(
> 
> On 3/26/23 01:12, Jad Baz wrote:
>> Indeed
>> Suppose the decision is not reversed though and the IANA db remains on 2023b
>> Vendors will pickup that version and will rollout to their devices incrementally
>>
>> The issue is that the rollout will not be instantaneous but rather incremental 
>> across different vendors, systems and devices over several days perhaps
>>
>> In the interim period, I'm wondering how transactions, meeting times and any 
>> sort of dealing with anyone outside Lebanon will take place when, say, one 
>> party is on 2023b while the other is still on 2022g
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 23:59 Rany Hany via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>>
>>     My gut feeling is that this change won't last long and will be repealed
>>     soon. The public frustration with this change is just too great,
>>     especially seeing that it was done on such short notice and with
>>     non-existent planning for the ramifications/methods for carrying it out
>>     (they didn't even contact IANA!)
>>
>>     At any rate it does appear that the consensus in the country is that DST
>>     is postponed and so I don't see a need to update the timezone data... and
>>     besides what is the protocol in these cases, a new timezone for every sect?
>>
>>     Perhaps it would be the first instance of timezones on the basis of sect
>>     than region (or have the Tibetans beaten us to the punch?)
>>
>>     On 3/25/23 23:45, Tim Parenti via tz wrote:
>>>
>>>     On Sat, 25 Mar 2023 at 16:46, Jad Baz via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>         Lebanon is going through many internal disputes surrounding the
>>>         latest decision to delay DST
>>>
>>>
>>>     Thanks for the heads-up.  This situation is unfortunate and is just one
>>>     of many reasons we advise governments to disseminate these changes far in
>>>     advance.  Thankfully, this sort of division appears rare in recent
>>>     memory, but it has the potential to be incredibly disruptive when it does
>>>     occur, and there's not really anything we can do about that.
>>>
>>>         All of these concerns are important to bring to light in view of
>>>         IANA's procedures for updating timezone data:
>>>         If you would ask today "what the average person on the street would
>>>         think the time actually is", it's not at all clear what the answer
>>>         would be
>>>
>>>
>>>     Yes, it appears many in Lebanon are planning to set their clocks forward
>>>     in about 15 minutes while others plan to wait a few more weeks. 
>>>     Hopefully those differences can be reconciled, and the situation can
>>>     clear itself up somewhat over the next few days.  Do keep us posted.
>>>
>>>     In the meantime we have, by coincidence of timing, two tz versions which
>>>     differ only by the Lebanese government's recent announcement.  Though
>>>     it's certainly an imperfect solution, those hoping to observe the
>>>     government's announced delay of DST could use tz version 2023b, while
>>>     those choosing to ignore the delay could use 2023a (or even 2022g if they
>>>     don't care about handling timestamps in Egypt, Greenland, Morocco, and
>>>     Palestine.)  Of course, such a split approach would present some pretty
>>>     major interoperability challenges.