[Reproducible-commits] [source-date-epoch-spec] 04/05: Dump in this bit about timezones, to be edited

[Chris Lamb]

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lamby pushed a commit to branch master
in repository source-date-epoch-spec.

commit 1296b6d79b89602af0fc78774407766bcb0abe15
Author: Chris Lamb <lamby at debian.org>
Date:   Sat Aug 22 14:04:16 2015 +0200

    Dump in this bit about timezones, to be edited
---
 source-date-epoch-spec.xml | 29 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 28 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/source-date-epoch-spec.xml b/source-date-epoch-spec.xml
index 6db31e0..74c1545 100644
--- a/source-date-epoch-spec.xml
+++ b/source-date-epoch-spec.xml
@@ -92,7 +92,34 @@
 	</sect2>
 
 	<sect2>
-		<title>Rationale and alternate proposals</title>
+		<title>Rationale</title>
+		<para>
+			We deliberate do not specify anything resembling a
+			"time zone". Developing such a standard would require
+			consideration of various issues:
+		</para>
+		<itemizedlist>
+		<listitem><para>
+			Intuitive and naive ways of handling human-readable
+			dates, such as the POSIX date functions are highly
+			flawed and freely mix implicit not-well-defined
+			calendars with absolute time. For example, they don't
+			specify they mean the Gregorian calendar, and/or don't
+			specify what to do with dates before when the Gregorian
+			calendar was introduced, or use named time zones that
+			require an up-to-date timezone database (e.g. with
+			historical DST definitions) to parse properly.
+		</para></listitem>
+		<listitem><para>
+			Since this is meant to be a universal standard that all
+			tools and distributions can support, we need to keep
+			things simple and precise, so that different groups of
+			people cannot accidentally interpret it in different
+			ways. So it is probably unwise to try to standardise
+			anything that resembles a named time zone, since that
+			is very very complex.
+		</para></listitem>
+		</itemizedlist>
 	</sect2>
 </sect1>
 

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