Message-ID: <501C1A79.8080707@shopzeus.com>
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:37:45 +0200
From: Laszlo Nagy <gandalf@shopzeus.com>
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To: Steve Crawford <scrawford@pinpointresearch.com>
CC: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Messed up time zones
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> So you took two distinct points in time, threw away some critical 
> information, and are surprised why they are now equal?
Well, I did not want to throw away any information. The actual 
representation could be something like:

"2012-11-04 01:30:00-08 in Europe/Budapest, Winter time"

and

"2012-11-04 01:30:00-08 in Europe/Budapest, Summer time".

It would be unambiguous, everybody would know the time zone, the UTC 
offset and the time value, and conversion back to UTC would be 
unambiguous too.

I presumed that the representation is like that. But I was wrong. I have 
checked other programming languages. As it turns out, nobody wants to 
change the representation just because there can be an ambiguous hour in 
every year. Now I think that most systems treat ambiguous time stamps as 
if they were in standard time. And who am I to go against the main flow? 
I'm sorry, I admit that the problem was in my head.