British Columbia redefines "Pacific Time"
Alan Coopersmith <[email protected]> Tue, 3 Mar 2026 14:17:55 -0800
| Newsgroups | dev.linux.lists.distributions |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
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, 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/[email protected]/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
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [email protected]
Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris