On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Anton Berezin wrote:

> > Setting your system's time zone to such a thing is asking for trouble.
>
> I really don't know.  Three-letter abbreviations are POSIX.1.  They
> might be obsolete, but they are still supported by most implementations,
> and used widely.

POSIX is wrong.  What else can I say?  POSIX also said that 2000 wasn't a
leap year, IIRC.

> "Tools not policy" seem to apply here.

I'm not sure what that means.

This isn't a policy issue, it's a question of being correct.  "EST" is not
a valid Olson database time zone.  If you want to make up some bogus ad
hoc rule then you can always declare that "EST = America/New_York", but if
you have to deal with users who may be in multiple time zones for a single
app, especially something like a web app where you have one database
(probably storing UTC) and a need to output datetimes in multiple zones,
then you'll have to do this correctly.

As for the DateTime project, there's a DateTime::TimeZone::Alias module
that lets you associate arbitrary names (abbreviations or whatever) with a
real time zone name.

But you'd have to define the EST => America/New_York mapping in your own
code.  Stuff like that will never be part of the core.


-dave

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