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Comment by msandin

Please make the distinction that _instants in time_ should be stored in the UTC but time specifications for scheduling purposes (10:30, mondays 14:50, 2017-05-17T13:40) are not instants in time, they are specification of time to be interpreted in a specific time zone and should be stored as such.

In a very real example there was once a product which let you schedule events by specifying a start date and a recurrence interval, say "daily". The software converted the start time to UTC in the zone of the schedule creator and stored that. But the conversion was done at the creation time which means it was done with a particular offset (say -5 hours) and when the relationship between the creators time zone and UTC changed as a result of DST changes the schedule ended up one hour of from what the creator intended. And the information about which timezone the thing had originally been scheduled in was lost and could not be retrieved.

parent msandin 9 years ago

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