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It wasn't clear what 'fixed' was, since that isn't normal terminology. I took 'fixed' to mean "pick a single timezone and stick to it". If you need to pick a t
by apaprocki 13y ago
It wasn't clear what 'fixed' was, since that isn't normal terminology. I took 'fixed' to mean "pick a single timezone and stick to it".
If you need to pick a timezone which does not observe DST, that rules out (generally speaking) most of North America and Europe and a lot of other places. So maybe you want your new time base to be Asia/Tokyo, Asia/Shanghai, Asia/Kolkata, Europe/Moscow? You're still at the whim of governments who constantly tinker with DST -- sure Europe/Moscow is "fixed" now, but it wasn't as close as 2 years ago.
To each their own, but I would not get into the business of depending on any particular zone in tzdata staying as it is currently defined for any amount of time in the future.
- taylodl 13y agoI meant fixed as in unvarying. So we store our time data in EST (UTC-05:00), instead of UTC. For half the year the stored time matches the local time it's to be displayed in and so no conversion is required. The other half of the year when local time is UTC-04:00 we only need to shift the stored time by one hour to display it properly. Many time handling libraries are extremely efficient at adding/subtracting an hour from time. This is important because we have many legacy systems using this data (think mainframe COBOL to today's latest technologies with a smattering of everything in between). So it's not just a single time handling library in use.