Re: darcs patch: Figure out timezone offset from timezone name

On Feb 2, 2008 9:17 PM, Bjorn Bringert wrote:

On Feb 2, 2008 8:49 PM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

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On Sat, 2008-02-02 at 11:36 -0800, Don Stewart wrote:

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david:

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Sat Feb 2 12:33:17 CET 2008 David Leuschner * Figure out timezone offset from timezone name

This should be forwarded to the time library maintainer, Bjorn Bringert.

If that is the case then he should probably update the email address that darcs uses:

http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/time/_darcs/prefs/email

It is currently set to this list.

Duncan

I also thought that Ashley Yakeley was the maintainer. I have written the code that this patch concerns though. The patch seems nice, but there are some problems:

- Time zone information is not static. - Time zone names are sometimes ambiguous.

Shouldn't we really use the OS time zone database for this?

David and I have discussed this, and it seems like this hard-coded timezone database is in any case better than the current incorrect behavior. In the majority of cases it will do the right thing, instead of being almost always incorrect as it is now. I have pushed the patch now, but there are some improvements that could be made: - There are no test cases that test this. The Arbitrary TimeZone instance in test/TestParseTime.hs doesn't generate time zone names, so time zone name handling doesn't get tested. - The timezone table is rather long, and uses plain 'lookup'. OTOH, introducing a dependency on the 'containers' package seems excessive just to do faster lookup. /Bjorn