[tz] Inappropriate project direction

[Mark Davis ☕️]

“...whether "standard time" or "alternate time" was intended.” is simply a
bad UI.

The user may have no notion of what that "standard" means, if times in
their language are called the equivalent of "Summer time" and "Winter
time". And "Summer time" may actually be more of the year, and thus more
"standard". Your phrase "(as would anyone sane)" would imply that all of
those users are insane, which seems just a tad far-fetched.

The right question to ask is to just use the names that are used:

... whether "Irish Standard Time" or "Greenwich Mean Time" was intended.

Mark

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 11:20 AM, Robert Elz <kre at munnari.oz.au> wrote:

>     Date:        Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:36:57 +0100
>     From:        =?UTF-8?B?TWFyayBEYXZpcyDimJXvuI8=?= <mark at macchiato.com>
>     Message-ID:  <CAJ2xs_Gjg4ioTx=DG-4xYBfrTnNhUiNLkb2CR=8ATbPT88z2
> FA at mail.gmail.com>
>
>   | Why does that make any difference to a user?
>
> Depends upon the user, and what they are doing.
>
> Consider a user with an app in which the user can enter a date & time
> for some purpose (calendaring, or whatever).  Suppose the user happens
> to enter the time during the period when the clocks have just switched
> backwards (the period of ambiguity) so the app, being a well written
> (and posixified) app, asks the user whether "standard time" or "alternate
> time"
> was intended.   The user, in Eire, wants "Irish Standard Time" so they
> reply "standard" (as would anyone sane).  The app then sets tm_isdst to 0
> and re-does the mktime() which (as things are now) will generate the "GMT"
> UTC equivalent time, instead of the "IST" version, exactly the opposite of
> what the user intended.    It does matter.
>
>   | Why do people think that the name  has to be aligned with that flag,
>
> The name obviously doesn't (in Eire, it could be in Gaellic) - but the
> concepts
> need to be applied correctly.
>
> The value of tm_isdst from localtime()  should be simply regarded as
> noise, it is of no value whatever.  But the uses of tm_isdst (badly named
> as
> the field is for the purpose) in mktime() are both valid, and useful, and
> for
> that it needs to work correctly.
>
> kre
>
>
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