On 2010-05-20 14:16, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
The new timezone-series and timezone-olson packages provide enhancements to timezone processing in Haskell's time package, Data.Time.
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/timezone-series http://hackage.haskell.org/package/timezone-olson
Excellent. I'd been considering doing something like this.
These enhancements are related to the fact that the Data.Time.TimeZone data type does not fully represent a timezone - it only represents a specific clock setting for a timezone, as is traditional for time APIs.
My TimeZone type is a bit odd. It's a time offset, with metadata, specifically an "is DST" flag and a three-letter name. (Three-letter names are ambiguous and not recommended for identifying time-zones, btw.) It's basically the information returned by localtime_r. It's also arguably the wrong name for the type. I'm wondering if it would be worth having a TimeOffset type containing just the timeZoneMinutes member, and using that in most places instead of TimeZone?
o There is not yet a truly platform-independent way of finding the Olson files for Unix-like platforms. Nowadays /usr/share/zoneinfo is a very popular location for them, but some platforms have them elsewhere.
Can this be discovered at build time? That's all that's needed. -- Ashley Yakeley