[tz] Ambiguous abbreviations for Australian timezones when daylight savings is in affect

Clive D.W. Feather clive at davros.org
Tue Apr 2 17:40:39 UTC 2013


Russ Allbery said:
>> That works for single points in time. It does not, however, handle
>> repeating meetings. For example:
> 
>>   Mondays at 8:00 PT
> 
> If you're writing calendaring software, generally you switch to using
> something like the tz identifiers, which give you America/Los_Angeles and
> well-defined behavior.
> 
> You *definitely* do not want to use time zone abbreviations for this,
> since they too would be completely wrong for the same reason!  If you
> schedule a meeting in PDT, you want it to change to PST when daylight
> saving time ends.  Which is the behavior you get from America/Los_Angeles
> (or some equivalent identifier such as PST8PDT).

Except, if I understand correctly, the US terminology "PT" (and similarly
"ET", "CT", and "MT") means "PST or PDT, whichever is currently in force").

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather          | If you lie to the compiler,
Email: clive at davros.org     | it will get its revenge.
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