On 10/4/2026 3:04 PM, Guy Harris via tz wrote:
On Oct 4, 2026, at 11:39 AM, James Bellaire <[email protected]> wrote:
While Canadians would balk at that level of national control it helps provide a
more coordinated definition of the time zones instead of allowing opt out and
changing zones down to the community level. But all politics being local, it
works for Canada.
In theory, current information and communication technology might make it
easier to deal with community-level control of timekeeping.
In practice, however, I suspect the tzdb maintainers might throw up their hands
if confronted with too much of that.
I hope that it does not come to that point. There has been a lot of
effort over the past 40 years to track every time change since 1970 and
allow the option for tracking prior to 1970 for specific use cases. (40
years being the introduction of the Olsen database.)
But, looking at the minor line shifts I wonder how many end users
actually use the america/indiana/* , america/north_dakota/* ,
america/kentucky/* zones (and others created by a line change). If their
software allows the choice of these options.
If Golden and RDEK did shift to "Vancouver Time", how many people would
look for a specific time zone for their community or would they simply
change their clock settings to america/vancouver (or the alias provided
by downstream software)? That is where one would need to look at the
downstream programmers to see if they support each community level zone.
