Bug#501169: Give up: Argentina's time zone is not regular and therefore not predictable
On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Fernando J. Rodríguez (Herr Groucho)
<groucho@lugmen.org.ar> wrote:
> I can confirm that the sid version of the package fixes the problem.
It doesn't really fix the problem. It just stalls it two weeks.
Unless the government decides to do the change upon October 19th,
sid's version would break by then.
> 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).
Yes, no DST has been issued, so the whole country is still at -3.
> 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.
Although this is true, I think that it's a bit exaggerated. Last year
we had an exception for San Luis. This year, if we switched to DST we
will probably have more exceptions for more provinces, but it's not
like we won't know about this.
> 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.
There are many countries that operate like that. Brazil, for example,
sets the DST yearly, and sometimes they change their minds after
having it set. It doesn't mean that we should give up on having a
correct tzdata.
Someone really screwed up, stating that our timezone was going to
change today. We shouldn't give up on having a correct timezone
because someone screwed up.
> 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.
I think it's perfectly doable. If not by upstream, directly by us.
> 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 don't think so. When you have to admin over a 100 servers, having
to manually change the timezone is really a headache. Also, doing
that would mean you'd lose any history regarding when things happened.
Not good.
> 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.
I don't think that anything like this should be done until it's really
necessary. Hopefully, we'll all just stay in -3 and be done with it.
--
Besos,
Marga
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