On Sun, 2019-06-02 at 18:10 +0100, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
As I, and others, have said, I don't believe there is any appetite to change the meaning of DST in Java - the pain would be far too great with no or negative benefits.
Perhaps it would be helpful to review what happened in the POSIX world in a similar situation. The man page for gettimeofday(3) on Linux has contained this narrative for as long as I can remember (mid/late 1990s): *** snip snip *** NOTES Traditionally, the fields of struct timeval were of type long. The tz_dsttime field has never been used under Linux. Thus, the following is purely of historic interest. On old systems, the field tz_dsttime contains a symbolic constant (values are given below) that indicates in which part of the year Daylight Saving Time is in force. (Note: this value is constant throughout the year: it does not indicate that DST is in force, it just selects an algorithm.) The daylight saving time algorithms defined are as follows: DST_NONE /* not on DST */ DST_USA /* USA style DST */ DST_AUST /* Australian style DST */ DST_WET /* Western European DST */ DST_MET /* Middle European DST */ DST_EET /* Eastern European DST */ DST_CAN /* Canada */ DST_GB /* Great Britain and Eire */ DST_RUM /* Romania */ DST_TUR /* Turkey */ DST_AUSTALT /* Australian style with shift in 1986 */ Of course it turned out that the period in which Daylight Saving Time is in force cannot be given by a simple algorithm, one per country; indeed, this period is determined by unpredictable political decisions. So this method of representing timezones has been abandoned. *** Snip snip *** I find it significant that POSIX apparently ended up ditching an entire API element in favor of adding a model capabale of handling the full complexities of civil timekeeping (as they were understood at the time); a move which surely must have caused heartburn for many POSIX- based applications in use at that time. Can anyone here recall the context and complexities surrounding this transition? Cheers! |---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer | | | Paravel Systems | |---------------------------------------------------------------------| | A room without books is like a body without a soul. | | | | -- Cicero | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|