[issue1904] Wish for timezone support for hg ci -d date

[timeless]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:25 AM, Martin Geisler
<bugs at mercurial.selenic.com> wrote:
> It would be nice if hg understood timezones.

it would be nice if time zones were um, unique.

http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/

> EST   Eastern Summer Time     Australia       UTC + 11 hours
> EST   Eastern Standard Time   Australia       UTC + 10 hours
> EST   Eastern Standard Time   North America   UTC - 5 hours

so,

>   $ hg ci -d 'Sat Apr 26 16:33:35 EST 2008'

I don't want to do the math to figure out how much variation there is
for that, but let's pretend it's roughly 16 hours

amusingly, there are only a couple of time zones for which this is a
problem, but EST is among them.

> EDT   Eastern Daylight Time   Australia       UTC + 11 hours
> EDT   Eastern Daylight Time   North America   UTC - 4 hours

> CST   Central Summer Time     Australia       UTC + 10:30 hours
> CST   Central Standard Time   Australia       UTC + 9:30 hours
> CST   Central Standard Time   North America   UTC - 6 hours

> CDT   Central Daylight Time   Australia       UTC + 10:30 hours
> CDT   Central Daylight Time   North America   UTC - 5 hours

Personally, I'm an American, and I grew up being all for imperialism
(units, time zones, blue jeans, etc.). I'm living in another country
and think sometimes us poor Americans need to learn about these
wonderful problems (especially the lack of affordable blue jeans).

Amusingly, I just realized the reporter is actually an Aussie. Let me
assure him that as an American, if I *were* to write this patch, I'd
have mapped EST/EDT and CST/CDT to the American time zones, they're at
least less ambiguous than the Australian ones :).

Making a converter which is locale sensitive is really spooky.