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Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

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Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#21

Post by ig1 »

andresmh wrote: post #7
orangecat wrote: post #2

Good for them. It makes much more sense to shift government/business hours if needed than constantly mucking with the time and screwing up millions of software installations.

can't the OS's handle the change automatically?

No. Every piece of software that deals with time in any kind of sophistication needs to have logic to handle it.

I used to work on a share price alerting system where you could say "if the price of stock X goes up by 10% during these hours than alert me", that creates a nightmare when it comes to DST changes. Do you use the timezone of the person who setup that alert (what if they're now in a different timezone do you change ?) or do you use the DST rules of the country the share trades in.

Imagine you have a calendaring app and someone from another country sends you a meeting request for the future that's past a DST change in one of your countries, but not past it in the other. It's possible for the time to be ambiguous unless you specify DST handling rules. What happens if a country changes DST rules (this happens far more often than you think) how do you adjust previously set appointments ?

Imagine your Google Analytics, what timezone do you save analytics data in and do you adjust for DST (the answer is PST by default, and if you change it, historical data won't be adjusted so you end up with a mishmash of time data).

In any scenario where you have to handle timezones it's complicated enough as it is, DST handling makes it a nightmare.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#22

Post by dhughes »

GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #18

China also maintains the same time year round.

Yes but for the entire country!

That's a lot of real estate under one time zone, it may be silly to have summer and winter times but having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly, Canada has six time zones.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#23

Post by weinzierl »

msbarnett wrote: post #19
yason wrote: post #14

Isn't winter time the standard clock and it's summer time that is the deviation from that? So Russia would be abolishing summer time that is also known as daylight savings time?

No. Per the article, they're staying on UTC+4 (aka DST) permanently, rather than falling back to UTC+3 in the winter.

Absolutely, but that is no counter argument to yason's statement. There is no such thing as winter time. As far as I understand it it's just that Moscow's time zone is UTC+3 and they are changing that to UTC+4. It's not that unusual that a country is in an another time zone than it should be geographically, look at Spain for example.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#25

Post by evgen »

gojomo wrote: post #24

Ho-hum. Want to be really forward-thinking? Follow the example of China, which discarded 5 time zones for a single national time in 1949. (We'd then adjust the office/retail hours to mimic local daylight, rather adjusting the numbers on the clock.)

One timezone covering enough longitudinal variation to want five timezones is a dumb idea. Doing the same thing in a country with enough east-west span to cover ten timezones would be an incredibly dumb idea.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#26

Post by technomancy »

andresmh wrote: post #7
orangecat wrote: post #2

Good for them. It makes much more sense to shift government/business hours if needed than constantly mucking with the time and screwing up millions of software installations.

can't the OS's handle the change automatically?

Software is often written with the assumption that time always goes forward, because, well, that's how time works. However, according to the rules of daylight savings, time actually goes backwards once a year.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#27

Post by ecaron »

pkulak wrote: post #6
gbhn wrote: post #4

That's a great precedent! I hope the US abandons winter time, too.

Lousy farmers...

Actually the farmers in my family have to reprogram their clocks twice a year to avoid DST, since cows are incredibly sensitive to their milking schedule and the twice-a-year hourly shift really screws with the herd.

I would go so far as to say that farmers hate DST more than programmers/sysadmins do.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#28

Post by furyg3 »

Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time?

It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#29

Post by weinzierl »

ig1 wrote: post #21
andresmh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't the OS's handle the change automatically?

No. Every piece of software that deals with time in any kind of sophistication needs to have logic to handle it. I used to work on a share price alerting system where you could say "if the price of stock X goes up by 10% during these hours than alert me", that creates a nightmare when it comes to DST changes. Do you use the timezone of the person who setup that alert (what if they're now in a different timezone do yo…

Unix-like systems like Linux and OSX handle that very well. The hardware real time clock ticks in UTC, file timestamps and the like are stored in UTC. The OS knows everything about time zones and DST and therefore can display the time the way you expect it.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#30

Post by technomancy »

Vivtek wrote: post #13

Indiana just went to daylight savings a couple of years back. Pissed me off - the new Republican governor said it would attract jobs (which is the reason anybody ever does anything in Indianapolis), and the success of that was predictable.

I live in the Pacific time zone, and for a long time I've been tempted to reset my clock to Pitcairn Island time, which is just like Pacific time, but without observing daylight savings.

Haven't made the jump yet, but it's only a matter of time before some stupid DST error fills me with enough rage.

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