| ▲ | danlitt 2 days ago | |
> Why? Because perhaps in 2030 Russia has taken over Dnipro and moved it from Europe/Kyiv to Europe/Moscow. I think in this case Europe/Kyiv would actually change its UTC offset to match Europe/Moscow, which I'm pretty sure the TZ database would handle just fine. > Our meeting time has obviously not changed, but its exact instant on the universal timeline has changed. I think a sentence like this should jump out in big red letters. At face value it is not meaningful - how can our meeting time have not changed if the exact instant it occurs has changed? If you chase this thought to its logical conclusion then it is not as obvious as you suggest. For instance, the number of hours between now and your proposed meeting has changed. Two meetings that happened to be simultaneous before now are no longer simultaneous because their relative UTC offsets changed. Is that a bug? What if your future physical event is the arrival of a train? The choice in front of you is to pick a completely precise specification on which everyone agrees (the "instant of time") with an incomplete specification which you admit yourself may change in the future. My vote is to at least encode something unambiguous, and then to adjust it if my vague notion (local time) changes. | ||
| ▲ | 1718627440 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |
> how can our meeting time have not changed if the exact instant it occurs has changed? Because human time is not a numeric offset, but a name of relevant points. > The choice in front of you is to pick a completely precise specification on which everyone agrees (the "instant of time") with an incomplete specification which you admit yourself may change in the future. My vote is to at least encode something unambiguous The incomplete ambiguous specification is the one everyone agrees to, programmers just don't like them. | ||
| ▲ | akio 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |
> I think in this case Europe/Kyiv would actually change its UTC offset to match Europe/Moscow, which I'm pretty sure the TZ database would handle just fine. Another user has already responded to the rest of your comment, so I’ll just respond to this. In the Ukraine scenario Russia does not control Kyiv, so no, Europe/Kyiv would not change its offset. | ||