[tz] On merging timezones - a radical proposal.

[John Hawkinson]

Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote on Wed, 22 May 2013
at 17:43:42 -0700 in <3DBE1853-4746-467A-8BC5-6040546C1226 at alum.mit.edu>:

> I, on the other hand, think users should, in the best of
> circumstances, not be presented with anything at all, and have the
> system automatically pick the right zone and, in circumstances where
> that's not possible, the user should be presented with a map that
> lets them pick a location, and users should never have to see a TZ
> identifier.

"That's nice," but we're not there yet.
And some consumers of the database will never have graphical interfaces.

And I don't forsee a good solution to ancillary uses of tz identifiers
for doing computation and determining "what time is it over there"?

I still regularly type

  TZ=Asia/Calcutta date

to determine the time in Bangalore, India, before sending email to
folks there. And I even have graphical tools that show me some such
times, but they're not always sufficient.

--jhawk at mit.edu
  John Hawkinson