From: Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Time-zone in dates
Date: Wed, 01 Jul 2015 11:17:17 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87d20bj4aq.fsf@alphaville.usersys.redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 87fv581jfv.fsf@ucl.ac.uk
Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
> On Tuesday, 30 Jun 2015 at 11:08, Nick Dokos wrote:
>> Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:
>>
>>> On Monday, 29 Jun 2015 at 21:17, Nick Dokos wrote:
>>>> The only reliable way of doing that is to use UTC as the "internal"
>>>> representation and translate to/from local time on external
>>>> display/input *only*. In the case of org mode, the "internal"
>>>> representation is user-visible, so that can cause confusion and some
>>>> head-scratching. But *any* other method is going to be a nightmare
>>>> (damhikt).
>>>
>>> This may be the correct approach although I worry about losing
>>> information by only storing UTC. Whether this information loss is
>>> important or not is difficult to predict. It may be of ephemeral
>>> importance only.
>>
>> In what way are you losing information?
>
> Sorry, should have been clear: the time zone information itself. By
> reducing to UTC, you lose one bit of information. Whether that matters
> or not in practice is not clear but I'm always uncomfortable when
> considering data representations that lead to information loss.
>
> I've been trying to come up with an example that would illustrate the
> problem but I've failed so far.
>
> Funnily enough, the one example I can think of that would be difficult
> to manage with UTC is the case of not wanting to specify a time
> zone. Somewhat contrived but, for instance, wanting to do something
> every morning such as brushing my teeth. This would be, say, at 7am
> regardless of which time zone I'm in. If this were stored in UTC, it
> would be at a different time depending on where I was at the time.
>
This is actually a pretty good example. This and Michael Brand's examples
make it clear that storing (just) UTC in the file is untenable.
Nick
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2015-07-01 15:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2015-06-26 13:40 Time-zone in dates Oleg Sivokon
2015-06-26 14:12 ` Eric S Fraga
2015-06-26 14:33 ` Left Right
2015-06-26 14:38 ` J. David Boyd
2015-06-26 15:10 ` Eric S Fraga
2015-06-26 19:20 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2015-06-26 19:57 ` francois
2015-06-26 21:48 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2015-06-29 13:17 ` Eric S Fraga
2015-06-30 1:17 ` Nick Dokos
2015-06-30 7:36 ` Eric S Fraga
2015-06-30 15:08 ` Nick Dokos
2015-07-01 6:27 ` Eric S Fraga
2015-07-01 10:04 ` Michael Brand
2015-07-01 11:22 ` Eric S Fraga
2015-07-07 17:27 ` Russell Adams
2015-07-08 15:59 ` Don Armstrong
2015-07-08 16:16 ` Russell Adams
2015-07-08 16:40 ` Eric S Fraga
2015-07-08 17:22 ` Titus von der Malsburg
2015-07-07 17:14 ` Don Armstrong
2015-07-01 15:17 ` Nick Dokos [this message]
2015-07-01 22:17 ` Left Right
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