std.datetime impenetrable

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, September 15, 2011 19:30:24 Steve Teale wrote:
> Oh, so it is difficult after all!  I thought it was just me.

No. It's hard. The best that you can get by asking Posix functions is the std 
and DST abbreviations for the current time zone - and those are non-unique. 
You'd have to do some crazy stuff like trying to find the time zone file for the 
current time zone on disk (whose location is usually something like 
/etc/localtime or /etc/timezone but is not entirely standard) and then compare 
it with every other time zone file to figure out which one it is. It's ugly. I 
do hope to come up with a reasonable way to do it at some point (you _should_ 
be able to do it after all), but I haven't yet. It would require a fair bit of 
research to figure out what's standard enough to rely on and what isn't. So, 
yeah. It's one of the many reasons that dealing with time sucks. Though 
hopefully std.datetime manages to make most of it fairly easy and pleasant to 
deal with.

> So I am probably going to have to ask. Then the interesting question will be
> which way around will offend fewest people.
> 
> I have installed it as ISO, then have to ask US users if they would prefer
> Letter Size, or the other way round then all those Euro and Indian users
> say 'typical American programmer!'.
> 
> Thanks for the rundown anyway.

No problem. std.datetime is actually pretty easy to use, but it's large enough 
that it can be a bit overwhelming.

- Jonathan M Davis