[Linux-aus] Western Australian Daylight savings

[Andrew Donnellan]

On 11/24/06, Glen Turner <glen.turner at 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integrated into the tzdata archive as mine was two revisions out of
date (on Debian Etch) and that means timezone rules change quickly...

-- 
Andrew Donnellan
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