[PBP-pm] Working with dates

[Bennett Todd]

2005-12-21T21:24:29 Jay Buffington:
> > Also, avoid offsets, as time zones with the same offsets can
> > actually have a great deal of variation.
> So time_zone should always be something like 'America/Los-Angeles'.

There are two different use cases.

When you are doing timezone conversions, or specifying a timezone
for any use over a range of times, zoneinfo database refs, mostly
Continent/City, are the very best way to go; this stuff mutates many
times a year, but a large team of people are keeping the ado
database up to date.

However, when you want to have an external representation of a
single time object (or a whole file full of 'em), specifying the
zoneinfo database ref requires a large, variable-length field, and a
whack of a lot of extra computation to robustly process it. ISO 8601
/ RFC 3339 timestamps allow you to specify numerical offsets, which
robustly describe a single time entry. The key difference is that a
timestamp doesn't have weirdly mutating summer time shifts changing
the conversion rules.

-Bennett
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