On 28/02/2019 06:03, Michael Douglass wrote:
Beyond the nuisance aspect of all this the use of such names is a bar to using this information in a number of systems. It may not be the only issue but it is one we can deal with.
And kick the problems of actually providing useful data to ALL systems further into the long grass? Many systems simply can't use the TZ data currently because there is no way of knowing just what version of data is provided with the CURRENT name. Hiding the data even further under even more isolated identifiers helps no-one. At the end of the day there has to be a system that when feed with a location can provide a reliable LIST of rules even if those rules include 'don't know' for times pre-1970. Pretending the likes of the time changes during the second world war never happened is just as political a decision as returning the wrong data for EXISTING rule sets currently! Any system using TZ currently should NOT return offsets for dates prior to 1970 ... That TZ IS currently only going to produce a subset of the rules and not even flag when those rules change seems to be a fact of life, so what IS needed now is to get tzdist running properly and for 'interested parties' to provide their own providers with their own set of names. The current set of rule names can then STILL be managed and provide a backward compatible source for current normalised data and more importantly flag where a timestamp IS outside of the scope of the data set! But there seems to be no interest in anybody providing such a service? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - https://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - https://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - https://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - https://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - https://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk