Re: Idea for handling timezones

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 07:40:47AM +0000, shironeko wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I, like many others on this list, have to move between timezones quite
> frequently. As I gathered from the archive, it seems the main complexity in
> supporting timezones is the difficulty revolving the change of timestamp format.
> So I have an idea, suppose we add a new keyword, "TIMEZONE" that can be set at
> the start of the file like so
> 
> 	#+TIMEZONE: America/Toronto
> 
> This specifies the timezone of all timestamps in the file [...]

Hm. Just a mumbling from the peanut gallery: isn't the timezone a property
of the timestamp itself?

Specifying the timezone for the whole file is progress, but imagine the
following scenario: I have a big file which is more or less a diary of
things which happened, with lots of timestamps thrown in (also LOGBOOK
entries).

If I move through timezones, only some of the timestamps are "elsewhere".

Switching "the whole file" to reflect the "current" timezone feels somehow
wrong to me (which timezone a specific timestamp "happened" in has also
some documentary value, after all).

To keep things unambiguous, more than just the timezone must be kept.
The current time offset is necessary to actually reconstruct the time
(DST and such things).

Of course, convincing Org to extend the timestamp format and regexps
might be a tough call :-)

Cheers
 - t

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