On Wed, 13 Apr 2022 at 14:10, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > c...@anastigmatix.net writes: > > On 2022-04-13 12:33, Dave Cramer wrote: > >> Specifically why the -05:17:32 > > > Timezones were regularized into their (typically hour-wide) chunks > > during a period around the late nineteenth century IIRC. > > > If you decompile the zoneinfo database to look at America/Toronto, > > you will probably find an entry for dates earlier than when the > > regularized zones were established there, and that entry will have > > an offset reflecting Toronto's actual longitude. > > Yeah, you'll see these weird offsets in just about every zone for dates > earlier than the late 1800s. I've got my doubts about how useful it is > to do that, but that's the policy the tzdb guys have. > > At one point I was considering whether we could project the oldest > recorded "standard time" offset backwards instead of believing the LMT > offsets. This would confuse many fewer people, and it's no less > logically defensible than applying the Gregorian calendar to years > centuries before Pope Gregory was born. But I fear that horse may > have left the barn already --- changing this behavior would have > its own downsides, and I do not think any other tzdb consumers do it. >
Oh please don't do something bespoke. I'm trying to make this work with the JDBC driver. So it has to be at least compatible with other libraries. Dave
