On Mon, 18 Apr 2016, Random832 wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2016, at 22:47, Vincent Tourneyrie wrote:
The problem is that this move to a secondary timezone leads to tons of problems and hours of corrections and explanation (mainly due to quick and dirty implementations of TZ but I cannot blame half of the developers of the planet). The fact that PHP uses this list expose this timezone list to the public.
PHP is a back-end programming language, and doesn't expose anything to the public. I assume you are referring to an application written in PHP.
PHP has an internal version of the library, and provides a file for listing all timezone identifiers: http://php.net/manual/en/datetimezone.listidentifiers.php
Why does your program expose the timezone names instead of the descriptions from zone.tab - in this case, the current description of America/Toronto is "Eastern - ON, QC (most areas)"?
And PHP exposes that through: derick@whisky:/tmp $ php -n -r '$tz = new DateTimeZone( "America/Toronto" ); var_dump( $tz->getLocation() );'
Also, even for a program that does expose timezone names, it's not clear why you can't still display America/Montreal, which appears as a symbolic link created by the backward compatibility file.
PHP does not use the on-system zic compiled versions of the database, but as my previous email says, it supports both America/Montreal and America/Toronto just fine. cheers, Derick