[tz] Troll in the long term

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ.AU
Tue Mar 25 16:57:38 UTC 2014


    Date:        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:15:58 +0000
    From:        Zefram <zefram at fysh.org>
    Message-ID:  <20140325151558.GF18071 at fysh.org>

  | As a bonus, this could express a permanently-on-DST zone,

There is no such thing - what you're describing is just a zone where
the time base does not (all that closely) match solar time.   We have
lots of those already.   The (totally meaningless) timezone abbreviation
can, of course, be anything that makes sense (so if it wants to have an "S"
for "summer" for times that apply in the middle of winter, then by all means...)

While extensions to the posix string as useless as it is) are being
contemplated, more important would be to make sure that it can express
an arbitrary number of changes to the base offset (and if you care about it,
the abbreviation) - with that, if necessary, strange summer time
representations can be faked as zone offset changes if the normal mechanism
cannot cope.

Of course, doing this must necessarily lead to very long (possible) env
strings - probably too long (possibly) to actually store literally.
Just maybe, someone might suggest that perhaps the actual timezone data
might be better in a file, with the env containing the file name!

kre



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