Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!prls!pyramid!bgg From: bgg@pyramid.pyramid.com ( R+D Australia) Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh Subject: Timezone interpretation problem Keywords: date, timezone, hemispheres Message-ID: <123900@pyramid.pyramid.com> Date: 19 Aug 90 20:57:48 GMT Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA Lines: 31 There is a problem in the date handling in MH 6.7. Let me describe what happened. In Sydney, Australia, I got a message from California where the timezone in the Date: field was -0700. When I replied to this message, it changed this in the In-reply-to: field to MST. That's wrong. I presume that it did this because my machine did not have daylight saving time turned on, therefor all dates generated mustn't have daylight saving time, irrespective of where in the world they refer to. I have worked around this by commenting out all the timezone names from zones[] in zotnet/tws/dtime.c. It now gets the timezone right, albeit in numeric form. I wonder if it's possible to translate a numeric timezone to a timezone name at all reliably? Given that the dates when countries change to and from summer time vary, and ignoring the northern and southern hemispheres, the simple-minded scheme used by MH will only ever manage to get it right for messages sent and received in the same country. Further, timezone names are ambiguous, particularly in Australia. On the East Coast, the government has decreed that we use EST to mean Eastern Standard Time; in summer, we use EST to mean Eastern Summer Time. Unfortunately, EST is also used on the East Coast of the US. Numeric timezones are the only unambiguous way to print timezones. They are also easiest to use when comparing times. Can I suggest that in the next MH distribution, that the timezone names be commented out (or removed)? If people want them, they can uncomment them. Ben Golding