[tz] Montreal timezone

Derick Rethans tz at derickrethans.nl
Mon Apr 18 15:34:22 UTC 2016


On Mon, 18 Apr 2016, Random832 wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016, at 22:47, Vincent Tourneyrie wrote:
> > The problem is that this move to a secondary timezone leads to tons of 
> > problems and hours of corrections and explanation (mainly due to quick 
> > and dirty implementations of TZ but I cannot blame half of the developers 
> > of the planet).
> > The fact that PHP uses this list expose this timezone list to the public.
> 
> PHP is a back-end programming language, and doesn't expose anything to
> the public. I assume you are referring to an application written in PHP.

PHP has an internal version of the library, and provides a file for 
listing all timezone identifiers: 
http://php.net/manual/en/datetimezone.listidentifiers.php

> Why does your program expose the timezone names instead of the
> descriptions from zone.tab - in this case, the current description of
> America/Toronto is "Eastern - ON, QC (most areas)"?

And PHP exposes that through:

derick at whisky:/tmp $ php -n -r '$tz = new DateTimeZone( "America/Toronto" ); var_dump( $tz->getLocation() );'

> Also, even for a program that does expose timezone names, it's not 
> clear why you can't still display America/Montreal, which appears as a 
> symbolic link created by the backward compatibility file.

PHP does not use the on-system zic compiled versions of the database, 
but as my previous email says, it supports both America/Montreal and 
America/Toronto just fine.

cheers,
Derick


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