[tz] Turkey to delay DST

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ.AU
Fri Feb 28 05:40:35 UTC 2014


    Date:        Fri, 28 Feb 2014 04:07:41 +0000
    From:        David Braverman <david at braverman.org>
    Message-ID:  <f287265160024d36bb98f9709dab9b68 at BLUPR04MB037.namprd04.prod.outlook.com>

  | Record prospective events in wall-clock time,
  | and retrospective events in UTC, maybe?

No, jhawk had it correct, events dealing with times should always have
a timezone attached.   For many things, it can just be implied (though that
can cause weird situations to arise) but for things like scheduling, it
should be explicit.

This doesn't mean (and I am sure jhawk didn't intend) that UTC can't be
the attached timezone when it is appropriate (for international network
meetings, it can be, as it means that people in jurisdictions where summer
time applies get the meeting time adjusted when summer time turns on/off,
and people who don't deal with summer time, get constant times - whereas if
a similar meeting is scheduled in local time of someone who has summer
time, then some participants get to deal with two variations a few weeks
apart, and perhaps a 2 hour meeting time shift - scheduling in local time
of an area where summer time doesn't apply is isomorphic to picking UTC
of course.)

On the other hand, what the default should be is a user interface issue.
As long as anything can be selected, I would be less emphatic than jhawk
that it should not be UTC - what is best depends entirely upon what is
easiest (most common) for most of the users, and the events they are
scheduling.  There's unlikely to be a single default that is best for
everyone - which also implies that there's unlikely to be any singe default
that is worst for everything.

After all of that, to return to the original point, I certainly agree
that it is better to get these kinds of changes published as quickly as
possible.   On the other hand, I also appreciate the desire to avoid
making large numbers of releases in a short period - it is always tempting
to wait for the next random govt to make some last minute arbitrary change
and bundle the updates together - especially at this time of the year
when that kind of thing is (unfortunately) common.  Getting the balance
between those two correct is hard.

kre



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