Comment by arcfour
4 days ago
That can happen and has. And the result is basically as you described it.
Yes, it's silly and inefficient, but so are time zones. It's not an easy problem to wrangle on a computer, for reasons that are exactly as you have described.
Yeah, it’s easy enough to pick at edge cases, but it’s amazing we have something that generally works this well at all. I don’t know if I have any better ideas, at least ones that the smart people maintaining the DB haven’t already considered and rejected.
It’s an inherently complex, ugly mess.