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Re: [Linux-aus] Western Australian Daylight savings



On 11/24/06, Glen Turner <glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au> wrote:
Andrew Donnellan wrote:

> Secondly I wonder when NIST or whoever controls tzdata will release a
> new version (which GNU has to take into glibc, distros have to
> integrate etc.)

Global time zones are not monitored by any standards organisation.

I'm aware of that.


In Australia the federal government has Constitutional authority for weights and measures, but have not used this power to set time zones, leaving the states free to legislate within their boundaries.

And that.


The people that invented the tz timezone system for UNIX maintain a mailing list which tracks timezones as well as they can, which you can view at http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/ and an archive of tzdata at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/

OK. That was what I was wondering about - the people who maintain the archives of tzdata.


The current of tzdata2006o does not incorporates the pending WA change. The legislation was poorly drafted, which makes developing a rule to cover more than this year more complex than it should be. It was also not clear if the law was yet in force; due to past experiences tzdata prefers to track changes only when they are fully official.

Great...

I thought Australia had learnt from the '06 Cwlth Games that DST is
something you *do* have to implement carefully (and cooperate with
software companies for...)


The poor attention of drafters to timezone issues isn't unique to WA. Here in SA the timezones are "Central Standard Time" (CST) and "Central Summer Time" (CST) and since the legislation or National Measurement Institute don't define alternative abbreviations the standard timezone is CST and the summer time is CST. Duh!

And yet in NSW/ACT/VIC/TAS they use "Daylight" not "Summer" - really consistent!

Anyway, all errors were mine, sorry. I also assumed this had been
integrated into the tzdata archive as mine was two revisions out of
date (on Debian Etch) and that means timezone rules change quickly...

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Andrew Donnellan
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