On Tue, 27 Jun 2023 at 08:20, Magnus Fromreide via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 08:20:53PM +0200, Anders Rosendahl via tz wrote: Other people have, just like you, said that this is a bad move and this have lead to a fork of the project but I do not remember where that is located, this fork is used in at least some of the BSDs.
https://github.com/JodaOrg/global-tz I don't want to maintain the fork, but I have no choice given the current situation at IANA tzdb is simply broken as the OP notes.
My personal opinion is that the default IANA build should say nothing about dates before 1970-01-01 - it should, in particular, not claim that changes for some random place (like Berlin) applies to some other place (like Copenhagen).
Indeed, this would be an acceptable and equitable outcome. It isn't ideal, as TZDB actually holds the data for pre-1970, but at least the pre-1970 data would be equally wrong everywhere, rather than favouring some places over others (which is my primary objection). On Tue, 27 Jun 2023 at 08:31, Guy Harris via tz <tz@iana.org> wrote:
(At this point, I wish we could get away with doing as Microsoft do, and just return -1 for all attempts to call localtime() for dates prior to the UNIX Epoch.)
The simplest approach would be to determine a rule, eg. - take the standard offset that applied on most days (modal average) for the 5 years from 1970 to 1975 - and use that pre-1970. - or, take the LMT of the city and round to the nearest hour So long as the answer is reasonable for most cases, it would be fine. Stephen