Re: British Columbia redefines "Pacific Time"

[Sam James <sam@gentoo.org>]

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Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith@oracle.com> writes:

> The Canadian province of British Columbia announced yesterday that they are:
>     "Adopting permanent daylight saving time: ‘Spring forward’ on
>    March 8
>    will be the last time change, ending twice-yearly clock changes."
>
> They've given us 8 months notice to deploy updates to timezone data before
> their now-cancelled switch off of daylight saving time in November
> [...]

*Just* missed the 2026a release as well
(https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/8b46071fd85a7a9434d63894bac64d30362cc16d),
I note it as I'd assumed the fix was in there until I checked.

> but of
> course, because naming is the hardest thing, they've decided that even though
> their time will now be the same as Mountain Standard Time, they have
> designated it as "Pacific Time", leading to the IANA TimeZone database folks
> having a bit of discussion on what timezone labels to generate in output time
> stamps:
>
> https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/667WE5QTIA7MP2E7NC7T3SO7VLMZLVZS/
>
> They've also pointed out the blast radius may reach a bit beyond their database:
>
>> Ruby on Rails' ActiveSupport::TimeZone, for instance, attempts
>> to "[l]imit the set of zones provided by TZInfo to a meaningful subset".
>> It maps the string "Pacific Time (US & Canada)" to "America/Los_Angeles".
>> The baked-in assumptions, once seemingly reasonable, now swiftly break down.
>> https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/TimeZone.html

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