[tz] [PROPOSED] Use "PST/PDT" for Philippine time

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ.AU
Mon Jun 25 11:03:52 UTC 2018


    Date:        Mon, 25 Jun 2018 10:16:05 +0100
    From:        Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk>
    Message-ID:  <cf68c796-2db1-a653-262b-3a55aeeb27f7 at lsces.co.uk>

  | The whole system SHOULD return 'don't know' where data is simply missing 
  | for whatever reason,

You can design a whole set of new interfaces with that kind of
return available if you like.   Traditionally localtime() was
expected to always succeed (there was no error return possible
at all) - that needed to be altered when the "int" tm_year became
too small to translate all time_t's but that's the only error now.

  | and using current data blindly with historic 
  | timestamps will always be wrong! 

Using current data for future timestamps is just as likely to be wrong.

But regardless of that, getting something relatively close to correct
is adequate for 99% of the uses that exist.   For historic values, while
the zone data might not be correct, the recorded timestamp is just as
likely to be even more incorrect (or vague) so the loss there is not
as great in most cases as it seems it could be.

kre



More information about the tz mailing list