Re: Time-zone in dates

[Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de>]

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On 2015-07-08 Wed 09:40, Eric S Fraga wrote:
> On Wednesday,  8 Jul 2015 at 11:16, Russell Adams wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> Then would you store the time in UTC only, or support a full timestamp
>> that included timezone?
>>
>> Finally when being displayed they can use the user's $TZ by default,
>> and maybe a suffix of @ TZ inside the date syntax?
>
> The ideal implementation, in my opinion, would have time stamps defined
> & stored with time zone information, as given by the user when creating
> them (although this could default to UTC, say, if not present in the
> time stamp) but displayed according to the user's $TZ (or overridden
> with emacs variable) in cases like agenda views.

I like this proposal because it solves the problem at hand (as far as I
can tell) but isn’t over-engineered.  I also like that the date string
that the user sees would be the string stored in the file, at least in
the default case (non-agenda view).  The mostly literal display of files
is what sets org-mode apart from other outlines because that allows
users to take full advantage of Emacs’ powerful text editing
capabilities.

> For upwards compatibility, however, it might be best if time stamps with
> no time zone information be considered to be at the user's timezone,
> as it is now.

This point is important.  Whatever the solution is it should not break
documents and workflows for users who don’t care about time zones.  I
agree that time zones are important for some people but let’s face it,
org-mode made it thus far without support time zones, which suggests
that it’s not that big of a deal for most users.

  Titus


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