Re: [Linux-aus] Western Australian Daylight savings

"Andrew Donnellan" <ajdlinux@gmail.com> · Fri Nov 24 15:35:03 2006

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integrated into the tzdata archive as mine was two revisions out of
date (on Debian Etch) and that means timezone rules change quickly...
--
Andrew Donnellan
-- Email - ajdlinuxATgmailDOTcom (primary)
-- Email - ajdlinuxATexemailDOTcomDOTau (secure)
http://andrewdonnellan.com
http://ajdlinux.wordpress.com
Jabber - ajdlinux@jabber.org.au
GPG - hkp://subkeys.pgp.net 0x5D4C0C58
-------------------------------
Member of Linux Australia - http://linux.org.au
Debian user - http://debian.org
Get free rewards - http://ezyrewards.com/?id=23484
OpenNIC user - http://www.opennic.unrated.net