Re: Idea for handling timezones

[Shironeko]

On Fri, 2021-04-02 at 13:34 +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 07:40:47AM +0000, shironeko wrote:
> 
> Hm. Just a mumbling from the peanut gallery: isn't the timezone a property
> of the timestamp itself?
> 
> Specifying the timezone for the whole file is progress, but imagine the
> following scenario: I have a big file which is more or less a diary of
> things which happened, with lots of timestamps thrown in (also LOGBOOK
> entries).
> 
> If I move through timezones, only some of the timestamps are "elsewhere".
> 

There are separate hacks for that, see
https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/13463/specify-timezone-in-org-date-format

> Switching "the whole file" to reflect the "current" timezone feels somehow
> wrong to me (which timezone a specific timestamp "happened" in has also
> some documentary value, after all).
> 
> To keep things unambiguous, more than just the timezone must be kept.
> The current time offset is necessary to actually reconstruct the time
> (DST and such things).

This is why timezones need to be specified in the tz database format, it does
all the right things and makes sure the converted timestamp corresponds to the
same instant. 

> Of course, convincing Org to extend the timestamp format and regexps
> might be a tough call :-)

This is exactly the problem I'm trying to avoid.

Regards,
shiro

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