Hacker News Reader

Comment by marzipanWhale | Hacker News Reader

I recently learned that Morocco observes daylight saving time all year... Except for Ramadan. So sometimes they use standard time in winter, sometimes in summer.

Seems to me it would be annoying for the populace, and downright nightmarish for software developers.

View on HN

Can confirm, in my last job we supported customers in Morocco and our software dealt directly with timezones, so it was a ... challenge.

I can't remember the details, but in some countries the only legally acceptable date for the start of Ramadan is the direct observation of the new moon. Thus the day when Ramadan starts cannot be predicted in advance. Note that I believe this is the case mostly in the Gulf states, other Muslim-majority countries are fine to trust astronomical calculations.

It seems like they could declare that the time would change on dates that are safely before Ramadan starts / after Ramadan ends.

From 2012 Morocco had daylight saving twice, they went forward in April, back in July, forward in August and back in September. This lasted 6 years.

It looks like this ended because they moved to permanent UTC+1 now... Casablanca is at 7.6 degrees west, nearly on the border between theoretical UTC and UTC-1. I understand relations with their African neighbors aren't great, so this is presumably to synchronize with European neighbors? It looks like they do still drop back to UTC for Ramadan.

Hardly permanent. They’ll be matched with Portugal and Canary Islands most of the year rather than mainland Spain, but Spain in winter but then for Ramadan at a changing time of year they’ll match with Azores unless it’s winter when they match with Portugal.

If you want to sync with europe change at the same time as europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com