[tz] [PATCH] Revert recent pre-1970 changes.

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 1 September 2013 10:20, Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> On Sep 1, 2013, at 1:55 AM, Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> wrote:
>> ISO-3166 codes are important to the vast majority of actual
>> applications that care about time-zones.
>
> ..."care about time-zones" presumably meaning "*explicitly* care about time-zones", for example, applications that explicitly specify a time zone (whether wired in, specified as an application parameter, or specified in some configuration file or database for the application), rather than "*implicitly* care about time-zones", for example, the "date" command on UN*X systems, which cares that ctime() will convert seconds-since-the-Epoch to a string giving local time in the user's time zone, but doesn't explicitly request a particular time zone (and which has absolutely no idea what an ISO 3166 country code is, and has no reason to know).

The applications I work with and libraries I manage allow a developer
to find the local time and offset from UTC/Greenwich for any instant
on the timeline. If this were only a problem of what the current time
is, life would be easy.
Stephen