[tz] re : Time zones in Ukraine

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at systematicsw.ab.ca
Fri Apr 18 22:55:55 UTC 2014


On 2014-04-17 11:02, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014, at 9:39, Marc Lehmann wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 08:29:52AM -0400, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
>>> And yet we don't care to store what timezone the file was created in,
>>
>> What _we_ care is pretty irrelevant, and some systems do store the
>> timezone, after all, if you have a posix timestamp and an archived
>> timezone id, you already have such a system.
>
> My point is, if maintaining the accuracy of the local time of historical
> timestamps were a common need, someone would have designed a system that
> actually does this, rather than merely pretending to do it only when a
> file is never moved (geographically) from its original location.
>
> And the cost of serving this imagined need - up front rather than only
> for people to go looking for it - is unbounded bloat in the timezone
> selection list.

Not all the world's a file timestamp, to paraphrase Henry Spencer.
Real property systems have to handle dates from previous centuries.
Systems dealing with people have to be able to handle date/time stamps
from decades to more than a century in the past and the future.
Financial trading systems have to be able to handle sub-ms current times
and time frames of decades for stock holdings and long term investments.
Many of these are now built on top of the date/time handling infrastructure
provided by this project.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis


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