4 ms·

Rendering future times as local time already has a problem where the timezone (DST) could potentially change.

• nly 5y ago
  The real answer is you should store the timezone with the timestamp So you store "the meeting is at 10am London time". This will work, always...except for when you repeat an hour due to the DST shift but that's usually in the middle of the night on a Sunday
  • globular-toast 5y ago
    Assuming London exists in the future ;) Yes... this way leads to madness. Time seems to be in a special class of problems that is easy to get wrong and hard to get right. I think we just have to aim for "least wrong" and try to keep our sanity intact.
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    Another problem here is that DST is political, and under local political control. Politicians don't get why changes in timscales have to be announced well in advance; there have been cases where they were announced as little as a month before they came effect. Some commenters seem to wonder why people care about the relationships between timescales, and how to convert between them. Well, contracts seems to be a good example. It could be vitally important to know, to the second, when a 200-year-old contract came into force.