[conspire] "Time zones exist to make programmers' lives miserable" ...

[Nick Moffitt]

On 16Feb2021 10:35am (-0800), Rick Moen wrote:
> I should throw in here that descriptor "PST8PDT" is a valid timezone
> name for our evil twins (Pacific Time).
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones calls that
> name deprecated, and advises "Choose a zone that observes PST with
> United States daylight saving time rules, such as America/Los_Angeles."
> I'll be damned if I know exactly why.

The reasoning is roughly that if California should suddenly come to its senses and stop fiddling with the clocks twice a year, your San Francisco server would still be set to the correct wall time year-round with `America/Los_Angeles`, while `PST8PDT` would become a way of saying "I know you think you're right, but I want to move High Noon to 1pm for half the year even though we stopped doing this years ago."

Of course if California did this and Oregon and Washington kept on using PDT, people would have to rush to change their TZ to `America/Seattle` or something until everyone got on board.  So it's not the most robust argument.