Is more detailed timezone history desired?

Dave Rolsky autarch at urth.org
Thu Mar 10 22:38:01 UTC 2005


On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Alois Treindl <alois at astro.ch> writes:
>
>> Because I read in the docu that the focus of tzdata is the post-1970
>> time range, I have asked my question.
>
> My focus has been on the post-1970 time range mainly because I didn't 
> have the resources to go back before that.  POSIX specifies a 1970 
> cutoff but it's pretty arbitrary.  In practice the vast majority of 
> POSIX systems support negative time stamps (for times before 1970), so 
> it would be nice to get things "right" on such hosts (for people who 
> prefer such things).

Plus the data can be used for other projects.  For the Perl DateTime code 
I maintain, I use the Olson DB files to generate TZ change data as Perl 
modules.  Since I'm not using an epoch-based time representation, the 
min/max limits on date ranges are much, much bigger than a 32-bit epoch 
allows.


-dave

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