Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:15:58 +0000 From: Zefram <zefram@fysh.org> Message-ID: <20140325151558.GF18071@fysh.org> | As a bonus, this could express a permanently-on-DST zone, There is no such thing - what you're describing is just a zone where the time base does not (all that closely) match solar time. We have lots of those already. The (totally meaningless) timezone abbreviation can, of course, be anything that makes sense (so if it wants to have an "S" for "summer" for times that apply in the middle of winter, then by all means...) While extensions to the posix string as useless as it is) are being contemplated, more important would be to make sure that it can express an arbitrary number of changes to the base offset (and if you care about it, the abbreviation) - with that, if necessary, strange summer time representations can be faked as zone offset changes if the normal mechanism cannot cope. Of course, doing this must necessarily lead to very long (possible) env strings - probably too long (possibly) to actually store literally. Just maybe, someone might suggest that perhaps the actual timezone data might be better in a file, with the env containing the file name! kre