3 ms·

Using one of the most extreme edge cases is not a good argument. How often is Samoa (or another small dateline-neighbour country) going to 'jump sides'?

• masklinn 10y ago
  > Using one of the most extreme edge cases is not a good argument. 1. How is it not a good argument? It's an actual historical fact which is not yet 5 years old rather than some intellectual exercise, you can hardly go better than "this stuff happened not 5 years ago". 2. The only "extreme" part here is the magnitude of the drift, it's a clear example and demonstration of the issue. > How often is Samoa going to 'jump sides'? How is that relevant to the problem specifically and clearly existing? Does it matter if your calendar is 24h off or 6h off? Your system is FUBAR either way. > or another small dateline-neighbour country The dateline isn't even relevant, are you somehow trying to win a prize in missing the point?
  • vacri 10y ago
    > It's an actual historical fact It's actual historic fact that the gregorian calendar we use skipped 11 days, but I don't see your suggestion solving that. Again, it was "just magnitude". > Does it matter if your calendar is 24h off or 6h off? Your system is FUBAR either way. Your theoretical appointment-haver might not blink at an appointment at a normal time + 1 day in the future, but might blink when their appointments start in the early afternoon and continue until midnight. The fact is that if you skip days, then it doesn't matter if you use local or UTC time. > are you somehow trying to win a prize in missing the point? I'm not the cretin who thinks that timekeeping is a binary good/bad state. Some applications have troubles when they're milliseconds out. Others have quite a bit of lag time that they can handle. A daily to-do list just needs to appear on the right day, for example; DST means little to it.
• toyg 10y ago
  Timezones change all the time. There are almost 200 countries in the world, some so large that even their sub-states can and do change timezone rules on their own (US, Russia, India, China...). This is why Linux distributions have a dedicated package listing timezone info that is updated almost weekly, and Windows has similar arrangements. Any solid datetime implementation better consider that time is not, in fact, immutable - even UTC can and will shift here and there.
  • vacri 10y ago
    I am aware of this, but picking an extreme example and discussing it like it's a standard occurrence just muddies the issues.