Re: CET timezone

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Zefram wrote:

>> I can understand the arguments about EST, but if there's no ambiguity
>> about CET,
>
> We just found an ambiguity about CET: does it include the DST rules?
> Also, consider that your form of CET, with European-rules DST, is only
> defined for 1977 and later (when the EU DST rules are defined), so it
> falls apart if you need to process earlier times.  For those applications
> you're forced to distinguish between Europe/Paris, Europe/Berlin, and
> the others.  Not to mention that countries went onto CET-with-DST at
> different times.

No, CET has the C-Eur rules, which go back to 1916. But yes, it is totally 
broken for historical dates. Nonetheless, if it's in Olson, it might as 
well be in DT::TZ. I realized I can't force people not to be stupid, much 
as I wish I could ;)

> If you have some definite idea about what "CET" means in your
> application context, go ahead and implement it.  That might be an alias
> to Europe/Berlin, or a fixed offset from UT, or a synthetic timezone
> (with its own tzfile) that doesn't match civil time anywhere.  But be
> aware that it's not universally meaningful, and do it at the application
> level without gumming up the implementation for everyone else.

Also note that this is not Ton's app. This is an app that a client of his 
is trying to install on their own server. They chose CET as their zone, 
and Ton's app is just trying to get the local datetime for the users. He's 
not in a position to fix this.


-dave

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