Chipping in very late on this discussion: Ted Byers <r.ted.by...@gmail.com> on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 01:58:23 -0400 wrote: > But there remains the question of possibly incompatible timezone names as > the author of the location packeg, that gives timezone as a function of > latitude and longitude wrote in his documentation that he used posix > timezones and that some of these might be usable in the datetime timezone > packages. He implied, therefore, that some may not be.
Remember the city of Urumqi in China. The Chinese people generally use the official China time zone (Asia/Shanghai) but the local Uyghur population uses a local time (Asia/Urumqi). Thus, in that city, you need to know which of the two time zones the user wishes to use — there are two possible answers, depending in part on the ethnicity of the user, and perhaps on their need to coordinate their activities with other people in the region. The latter consideration might work either way: an Uyghur might need to work with Chinese and choose Asia/Shanghai time, while a Chinese might need to work with Uyghurs and choose Asia/Urumqi time. You can find copious recent discussion about Asia/Shanghai vs Asia/Beijing during August 2012 on the t...@iana.org mailing list. You can find copious but much older discussion of Urumqi in the archives of the same mailing list (1988, 2008, 2009). You can also find some information about Urumqi in the 'asia' file delivered with the Olson database - which is where I collected the dates from. -- Jonathan Leffler (jleff...@us.ibm.com) STSM, Informix Database Engineering, IBM Information Management 4400 N First St, San Jose, CA 95134-1257 Tel: +1 408-956-2436 Tieline: 475-2436 "I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it!"
