[tz] On merging timezones - a radical proposal.
John Hawkinson
jhawk at mit.edu
Thu May 23 00:47:18 UTC 2013
Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote on Wed, 22 May 2013
at 17:43:42 -0700 in <3DBE1853-4746-467A-8BC5-6040546C1226 at alum.mit.edu>:
> I, on the other hand, think users should, in the best of
> circumstances, not be presented with anything at all, and have the
> system automatically pick the right zone and, in circumstances where
> that's not possible, the user should be presented with a map that
> lets them pick a location, and users should never have to see a TZ
> identifier.
"That's nice," but we're not there yet.
And some consumers of the database will never have graphical interfaces.
And I don't forsee a good solution to ancillary uses of tz identifiers
for doing computation and determining "what time is it over there"?
I still regularly type
TZ=Asia/Calcutta date
to determine the time in Bangalore, India, before sending email to
folks there. And I even have graphical tools that show me some such
times, but they're not always sufficient.
--jhawk at mit.edu
John Hawkinson
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