Egypt goes back to Daylight Saving Time
With only a week's notice, the government of Egypt has decided to go back to daylight saving time - effective today. That's right, it was casually announced on May 7th, and went into place at Midnight on May 15th. That is, at 24:00 May 15th, which most folks would recognize as 00:00 on May 16th. Of course, this took some guesswork by the TZ community to figure out. It wasn't in the announcement.
Those times are in Egypt local time. That's May 15th 2014 at 22:00 UTC. More information on the change here.
The short notice sent many people scrambling trying to figure out what the exact specifics of the change are. Finally on May 13th, with just two days to go, IANA released TZDB 2014c with the required changes.
Microsoft shortly thereafter released hotfix KB2967990. This hotfix does not automatically come down via Windows Update - so if you work with the Egyptian time zone on Windows, you'll need to apply it manually. This is true whether you happen to be using a computer in Egypt, or if you are scheduling meetings via Outlook with someone in Egypt, or if you have an application that uses the TimeZoneInfo class in .Net with the "Egypt Standard Time" time zone id.
Others have followed with updates as well. Here is a comprehensive list, or at least all that I could find. (Let me know if you know of one to add.)
- Microsoft Windows and .Net: KB2967990
- IANA TZ 2014c
- Java TZUpdater 1.4.4
- PHP timezonedb 2014.3 via PECL
- Python pytz 2014.3 via pypi
- Ubuntu Linux tzdata 2014c-0ubuntu0.14.04 via Launchpad
- Ruby tzinfo-data 1.2014.3 via RubyGems.org
Some implementations will require manually recompiling from the IANA sources:
The fact that there's a time zone change is not big news. There are usually a dozen or so per year. The problem here is the short notice. It takes time to digest, interpret, validate, incorporate, distribute, and adopt these sort of changes. The processes are all in place, but it requires time!
To the governments of the world: Please allow at least a month for these sort of changes, or preferably 3 months or more. Short notice changes will cause people to miss scheduled appointments. Cumulatively this has a negative net effect on your economy.