Bug#501169: Give up: Argentina's time zone is not regular and therefore not predictable
I can confirm that the sid version of the package fixes the problem. I
checked all of the America/Argentina/* time zones and they all yield
UTC-3 today, which is the correct time zone for all regions of the
country as far as I can tell. I verified Argentina/Buenos_Aires and
Argentina/Mendoza by seeing what time television channels from those
two cities announced on screen, and by dialing 113, which is supposed
to broadcast HOA (hora oficial argentina/official Argentine time).
It is hard to know what time it is in every possible location of
Argentina. There is the HOA set by the federal goverment, which is
set with a very City of Buenos Aires-centric view and there is the
time each province can set for itself, wich can differ from HOA
because of economical or scientifical reasons, but usually for
demagogical effect or just for the sake of opposing the federal
goverment in case a different political party is in office. So one
has to follow the political scene of 24 different districts to be
able to informedly answer the question of what time it is in
Argentina.
Anyway, the current state of affairs regarding HOA is provided by
National Law 26350 [1]. It says that during most of the year the time
zone will be UTC-3, and that in summer it will be UTC-2. It also says
that the executive branch of the federal goverment will set *yearly*
the beginning and ending date of the summer time. Last summer it was
from December 30th, 2007 to March 16th 2008 (and I really hated it),
but clearly there is no fixed rule to follow and code in tzdata.
So we will witness arbitrary time shifts in HOA and in even more in
each Province's time for the years to come, that I'm not convinced
that can be tracked sufficiently in advance upstream to land on
debian-volatile on time for the time shifts.
[1] http://www.hidro.gov.ar/Observatorio/QueHoraUtiliza.asp
For us Argentinians it is easier to just give up on automatic
adjustments of local time with respect to UTC and manually set
etc/gmt-4, etc/gmt-3 or etc/gmt-2 as time zone as the occasion
dictates.
I would also suggest the creation of an Argentina/HOA time zone and 24
other Argentina/* zones, one for each state (province or autonomus
city), because that is a model that will more closely follow the
current practice on how we set our clocks in Argentina.
Regards,
--
Herr Groucho
ID Jabber: groucho@lugmen.org.ar
Clave pública GPG: hkp://pks.lugmen.org.ar
Fingerprint GPG: B7BD 0FC7 D9A2 66F3 4EFC 45EE 7DE2 3932 597B 6354
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