Re: Daylight Savings? indiana

Jordan Abel wrote:
With the day to 'spring forward' coming up fast, many systems are still
using old versions of tzdata that still are not updated for Indiana's
change this year, or the nationwide (and more and more of Canada with
each passing month) change next year. Thoughts?

<soapbox>
There are other proposals, e.g.:
http://www.standardtime.com/proposal.shtml

I tend to think the mucking about with the clocks is bunk. And having
the rules by which when and how the changes occur subject to the
prevailing political winds only makes matters worse.

Why don't we just stop screwing around with the clocks (drop the
daylight / summer time conversions), and if we still really want to
shift schedules about by an hour, have a national (or better yet,
hemispherical) shift your scheduled by an hour day (well, two such
days per year), and stop screwing around with the clocks (except of
course the appropriate leap second adjustments). And, speaking of
which, don't change the leap second - it's fine for now (and many many
many years into the future). Getting rid of the leap second is also a
bad idea. - if software needs to be corrected to properly handle the
leap seconds (which have been around and well documented for well over
a decade), then fix the software. But repeatedly/continually mucking
about with daylight/summer time stuff, and requiring increasingly more
frequent and complex software changes, and a rather increasingly nasty
and complex mapping between absolute time and relative local times for
different times/dates in history - that's just asking for trouble that
needn't be there, and for no substantially offsetting gain.
</soapbox>

In the meantime, manage to get your software / operating system
vendors/distributors to provide the updates such that the software's
view/presentation of time will correspond to the ever changing laws
and practices.

.

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