On Wed, May 22, 2013, at 15:24, Guy Harris wrote:
Define "users". Do you mean "administrators" for big machines and "end users" for personal machines?
Whoever picks time zones, including end users on big machines that allow end users to configure how times are displayed to them (speaking of all UN*X systems...)
Presumably if users can "pick advanced", the *system vendors* have to ship the full set of time zone files (otherwise, "advanced" isn't available).
I am not proposing reducing the timezone files that are shipped, merely adding a way to have fewer timezones to choose from in the UI. No-one _now_, to my knowledge, doesn't ship the backwards-compatibility links, and they're even less useful than the ones I'm proposing de-emphasizing.
We don't handle that because UN*X APIs don't offer a mechanism for saying "please use the time zone I was in at a given time to convert that time"; if they did, they could use our database for that.
Why is that not what localtime() means? And if it _doesn't_ mean that, why doesn't localtime simply _always_ use Eastern for people in Vincennes, despite the fact that "the time zone they were in at a given time" was Central for part of 2006-2007?