Comment by kstrauser
4 days ago
That’s unkind. I want to do the right thing in such cases, but I’m also learning about this today for the very first time. I’ve never, not once, heard that US/Pacific was a bad idea until this post. If not for this, I still wouldn’t know. I thought it and America/Los_Angeles were semantically identically and just kind of symlinks to PST8PDT or whatever.
If anything, the city TZ always felt off, like I was opting in to that specific city’s strange legal decisions or something.
> If anything, the city TZ always felt off, like I was opting in to that specific city’s strange legal decisions or something.
that is exactly what time zones are for :) not being snarky (wasn't before either, i really love that blog!). but the whole reason for tz is to join the ever changing oddities of political bodies from one very specific region.
My point there was that it feels hyperlocal to Los Angeles. Does it have some TZ law my own city in the same zone doesn’t? Hope not!
(It doesn’t, but that’s what it implies to me.)
The geographic extent of legislative time zones can change, they can morph, split and merge, and also appear and vanish completely. In consequence, the only way to unambiguously specify which local time results when adding durations backwards and forwards in time, without being constrained to limited periods of legislative non-change, is to fix a specific geographical location, and to specify how local time has changed and is changing at that particular location. That is what the tz database does. In principle, you could define a separate time zone for each point on Earth, but that isn’t practical. So the compromise is to pick representative cities.
One important thing to understand is that the time zones of the tz database, and hence generally the time zones used in computing, are a slightly different concept than legislative time zones.
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For general user interfaces, it's for the user interface to show "US Pacific" or "UK" rather than America/Los_Angeles and Europe/London.
The timezone selector in KDE shows "Los Angeles | America/United States of America | Pacific" and "London | Europe/United Kingdom", for example.