How to conclude KEP2 for good

Georg C. F. Greve greve at kolabsys.com
Tue Apr 5 14:33:00 CEST 2011


On Tuesday 05 April 2011 10.45:04 Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) wrote:
> Too bad that the assumption Georg made is faulty to begin with. When
> storing  UTC, there is no "DST Assumption" just like there is no UTCWND or
> UTCWSD - this terminology has been made up to confuse and justify the
> argument and bears no weight at all.

My apologies. As discussed, I did not realize you were no longer proposing 
what you wrote in your mail 

	http://kolab.org/pipermail/kolab-format/2011-March/001256.html

where you write:

	- During the summer, user decides he wants a weekly 11am company meeting 
and is in Zurich.
	- Writes out 10 UTC, Europe/Zurich, as the baseline offset is +1 -and does 
not write out 9 UTC accounting for the current DST offset to UTC.

	- During the winter, user decides he wants a weekly 11am company meeting 
and is in Zurich,
	- Writes out 10 UTC, Europe/Zurich, as the baseline offset is +1

According to that, 11:00 in Europe/Zurich gets written out as 10:00 UTC with 
or without DST in effect, or, to put it in your words from the same email:

	"While the specification could just say that datetimes should always be 
written out as if no DST was ever invented, I'm sure that leaves too much room 
for error."

Trouble is, DST exists, and 11:00 in Europe/Zurich *is* 09:00 UTC right now.

This is a legally binding hard technical fact: A value of 10:00 is *not* UTC.

This is not a neglegible minor political offset issue, it is just wrong.

So what the proposal implicitly did was to invent a new timezone for which DST 
handling is effectively rolled into one with UTC, greatly simplifying the 
writing, but at the cost of requiring to untangle them again before being able 
to use the data. Hence the attempt to communicate this by naming this time 
zone "UTC With No DST" (UTCWND) as in "as if no DST was ever invented" from 
the original proposal. 

My apologies if that was not semantically agreeable to some, and may have 
caused confusion for others.

But as I wrote before: This proposal seems to have been off the table without 
my noticing, so I may have been flogging a dead horse. Apologies for that.

Best regards,
Georg


-- 
Georg C. F. Greve
Chief Executive Officer

Kolab Systems AG
Zürich, Switzerland

e: greve at kolabsys.com
t: +41 78 904 43 33
w: http://kolabsys.com

pgp: 86574ACA Georg C. F. Greve
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