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by tempestn 102 days ago
The comment actually has it backwards. It says BC is moving from daylight to standard time, but should be the opposite. It's got the offset right though.
2 comments

Hmm the comment was a bit difficult to parse, but I think they got it correct. Remember that we have arbitrarily defined the time during local winter as the "standard" time. If we want to keep to that then "permanent daylight savings" is a contradictory term. So what is actually meant is abolishing DST while at the same time changing the standard time to be at the offset of DST before the change. So what I think they are saying is that DST is being abolished, but the actual effective offset at the time when it's abolished is unchanged.
That semantic confusion between daylight saving the switch, and daylight saving the offset, makes it perpetually confusing to argue about whether we should preserve daylight saving at all.
As far as the timezone file is concerned, it's two changes but one shift. This is covered more fully in the complete news blob rather than the snippet shown at the top. Today, British Columbia moved from Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8) to Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7); tomorrow the timezone is renamed to Pacific Time.

Unfortunately, the "PT" abbreviation is too short for the timezone database, so while they decide on another form they will temporarily use a bare -7 offset.

Ah, I see. They're reclassifying it as standard time without changing the offset. Yeah, it was my misunderstanding.