[LEAPSECS] Multi-timezone meetings

Daniel R. Tobias dan at tobias.name
Thu Jan 26 23:32:38 EST 2012


On 25 Jan 2012 at 12:05, Rob Seaman wrote:


> I don't recall saying any such thing. The original reply was to

> this comment from Daniel R. Tobias:

>

> > Usually such events are only "fixed" relative to local civil

> time in the place where the > event is to take place...

>

> I was pointing out that in the modern world events often have

> multiple timezones, and included my usual plea to collect use cases

> and discover requirements before speculating on appropriate

> solutions.


Yes, there are lots of different kinds of events, which have
different time zone dependencies. Some events, however, are
localized in space; if a local social club has its monthly gathering
at Joe's Bar and Grill on the third Saturday of the month at 7 PM,
then what's relevant is the local civil time in effect at the
location of that establishment. If they've been holding this meeting
every month since 1952, there have been several changes of daylight
saving rules that affected the actual UTC time of the event if it
held firmly to the 7 PM local time, and maybe the county containing
the location even switched from one side of a zone boundary to the
other. Maybe a future mad dictator will move the whole country to a
single zone that's 30 minutes removed from the current zone of that
location, and that will also alter the event time when construed as
UTC or TAI. The most sensible way to represent it in a calendar
program is to fix the time with regard to the location, so it flexes
with the time rules. I doubt any current calendar program is quite
robust enough to manage this in all cases.


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