Guy Harris wrote:
On Feb 11, 2018, at 7:45 PM, Steve Summit <scs@eskimo.com> wrote:
In that old model, a time zone has one offset from Greenwich/UTC...
Which is why I prefer calling the things identified by tzdb identifiers "tzdb regions" rather than "time zones" - a tzdb region may, over its history, be in more than one of [...] "time zones", and there may be more than one tzdb region in a given "time zone".
Well said. And even though I was just preaching about "things not always sufficiently appreciated", I'm not sure I've sufficiently appreciated this point. I live in America/New_York, and it's easy to imagine this is just sort of a longhand for EST5EDT, but of course it's not. (And if I lived in, say, northwestern Indiana, I would be less inclined to make this mistake. Perhaps living in northwestern Indiana for a few years should be a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to profess any real expertise on time zone issues.)