Why and when storing local time?

Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
Tue Apr 5 12:35:42 CEST 2011


Florian v. Samson wrote:
> > Note that it would be data for several TZ-IDs as startdate and enddate
> > could have use different timezones.
> 
> This is a really rare case, IMO, and these are at most two (not "several"),
> AFAICS.
> 

Actually most commonly flights that cross timezones start in one timezone but 
have their touch-down / controlled-crash time in the local timezone. The 
ability to choose different timezones for start-date and end-date to an event 
is very nice to have.

I flew back from the US to the UK last weekend, and as we all know the US 
changes to DST two weeks before Europe does. It just so happened Europe 
changed to DST this last weekend, however, so in order to lock down the time 
in my agenda, I would have to:

- take into account I live in the UK now (I'm very much used to being at GMT+1 
you can imagine),
- take the normal "minus 6" I'm used to, to be "minus 5" (UK) to be "minus 4" 
(DST in US),
- take current UTC+0 in the UK to be UTC+1 by the time I landed,
- translate it to whatever target timezone I wanted to use,
- calculate back and forth whatever start in local time and end in another 
local time was on the itinerary.

Reasonable use-case, I suppose ;-)

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

-- 
Senior Engineer, Kolab Systems AG

e: vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
t: +316 42 801 403
w: http://www.kolabsys.com

pgp: 9342 BF08
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kolab.org/pipermail/format/attachments/20110405/93ace170/attachment.html>


More information about the format mailing list