2007 Zoneinfo

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2006-Apr-01 08:18:07 -0800, Cy Schubert wrote:
>I think we should start thinking about the Daylight Saving Time changes due 
>in 2007. I'm not sure which locales will adopt the changes and which will 
>not adopt the changes.

Having just been through a timezone rule change and followed the fallout
both at work and on various mailing lists, I'd say it doesn't matter how
much notice you give, people will wait until the last minute to actually
do anything.  (And then discover that to make the changes take effect,
they need to restart processes but there's a ban on scheduled maintenance
so they can't make the change until the change is irrelevant).

I presume that (like Australia), each state is responsible for the
legislation defining time in that state.  In this case, you can't
finalise much until the states individually make up their minds
whether they are going to follow the changes or not.  Depending on the
degree of co-operative planning between states, this could even wind
up being iterative - where states announce a decision and later change
it due to pressure from surrounding states.

On the assumption that not all states will follow the new rules, there
are two areas that will need work:
- At least some of the US timezones will have two active sets of rules
  (and therefore need two distinct names)
- Will the knowledge of which locations use which rules be embedded in
  FreeBSD or not (ie, do I just select "I'm in Texas" and FreeBSD knows
  what timezone to select, or is there a choice of "I'm in CST using the
  old rules" vs "I'm in CST using the new rules").
Since FreeBSD basically imports the timezone files from NIH, this comes
down to (probably) following whatever winds up in the imported TZ files.

-- 
Peter Jeremy