Re: [FEATURE REQUEST] Timezone support in org-mode datestamps and org-agenda

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> Now there's still enough work for the applications to do: presentation,
> parsing, disambiguation, if necessary asking the user for help. Someone
> mentioned PostgreSQL -- this is a nice example of what can be done beyond
> the (comparatively!) boring details of time zone management :-)

Do I understand correctly that PostgreSQL insists on using timestamps
with time zone info in favour or ordinary timestamps? Exactly to avoid
issues with the same timestamp pointing to a different real time from
epoch depending on the current OS time zone setting?

Thinking more about this, I can see how it can be important for
clocking, and similar auto-recorded information. Users may be surprised
to record clocking on some task yesterday just to find the clocking data
in future upon travelling from Singapore to San Fran.

So, when implementing time zones, we may need to take care about adding
the time zone info when auto-inserting timestamps.

In addition, we may provide some mechanism to set the time zone for:
1. Individual files
2. For all files, including possible time zone transitions over time.

What I mean by (2) is when the user travels from, say, Australia to USA,
it could be possible to say: Use Australia/Seattle up to certain time
and then use USA/Austin.

However, the above considerations are just nice-to-haves and should not
be a blocker to a more generic time zone support in Org. Having an
ability to specify time zones manually will already cater needs for a
number of users.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>