[tz] [PATCH] Revert recent pre-1970 changes.

[Russ Allbery]

Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> writes:
> Guy Harris wrote:

>> Where I'm sitting right now as I type this sentence, the local time is
>> 4:24 PM and the offset from UTC is -7:00.

> And if I apply that offset in 6 months time will I get the right local
> time?  How do I find what the right offset should be in 6 months time? I
> currently don't have enough information.

Well, just to be pendantic, no one on earth has enough information to
answer that question, since it's impossible to answer.  Six months time
provides six months for governments to change the rules around local time,
and no one knows what changes they may enact.

The best that you can do is try to extrapolate forward based on current
laws and hope they don't change, and recalculate local time if they do
change.

> Easiest way is ask for their location which usually starts with a country
> code and then we don't have to display the whole list of timezones ? Just
> a sub-set if required ... If I just ask for their 'timezone' then I still
> need to ask for the country anyway. Providing country code as part of the
> data simply helps the process of asking.

Actually, in the most recent instances when I've been asked for my time
zone, I was not asked for my country.  I was asked for my continent and
then for the large city on that continent whose time mine matched.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>