Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!yarra!technix.oz.au!technix.oz.au!ahl From: ahl@technix.oz.au (Tony Landells) Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh Subject: Re: Timezone interpretation problem Message-ID: Date: 21 Aug 90 14:10:58 GMT References: <123900@pyramid.pyramid.com> <9008201520.AA24431@somewhere> Sender: ahl@technix.oz.au (Tony Landells) Organization: TechNIX Consulting Services, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 32 In-Reply-To: aks@HUB.UCSB.EDU's message of 20 Aug 90 15:19:55 GMT In article <9008201520.AA24431@somewhere> aks@HUB.UCSB.EDU (Alan Stebbens) wrote: Well, Ben, that's really drastic -- removing, or changing the defaults to suit, albeit in a more general fashion, the constraints of using MH in Australia. I can't say I agree with you at all. Ben did point out that the problem will exist any time you go between countries with different ideas of whether daylight savings is active or not. The worst case is probably different hemispheres, since they'll be almost six months out of sync., but all it takes it two places changing on different days to cause it to manifest in the same hemisphere. And in case you STILL haven't realised, the problem is symmetric, in that if it occurs with US mail going to Australia, then it should also occur with the return mail... Oh yeah: you'll probably have to add some disambiguating code to convert incoming dates from timezone names into timezone numbers, depending upon the country of origin. It really isn't that hard to do, though. Perhaps, a motivated Aussie can come up with suitable patches?? If it isn't that hard to do, I'd be pleased if you came up with the patches, because I don't see any way you can unambiguously determine the country of origin. To take an example I'm familiar with, HP domain (.hp.com) encompasses the whole world (or, at least, anywhere that HP has offices connected in some fashion to the internet), so you can't decide from the domain. Ben has mentioned that EST is used in both the US and Australia, so you can't use the timezone string... I'm afraid I just can't see how one would implement this disambiguating code: would you be so kind as to enlighten us? Tony Landells.