Date:        Mon, 17 Jul 2000 16:31:40 -0400
    From:        Laine Stump <lainestump@rcn.com>
    Message-ID:  <4.3.2.7.0.20000717162709.00b819b0@pop.rcn.com>

  | At 02:50 PM 7/17/00 -0500, Peter Seebach wrote:
  | >In message <200007171842.OAA07857@astro.cs.utk.edu>, Keith Moore writes:
  | > >What a crock.  US/Eastern was far more correct.  People in the US call 
  | > timezon
  | > >es
  | > >by their names far more often than "New York time".  They might not even 
  | > know
  | > >what timezone a particular city is in.
  | >
  | >Strongly seconded!  I'm not in Chicago time, I'm in "Central".

But which "Central" are you in?  Chichago?  Detroit?  Menominee?
Switzerland County, Indiana?  Louisville Kentucky?

They're all different timezones.   It is entirely possible that if all
you want is for the clock to show the right time today, then it might
not matter which of those you pick.  But if you really care about getting
timezone conversions right, then those are all different, and there are
times which will convert differently.

That's why the timezone database gave up on pretending that an entire
quarter of the US was a unit, and moved to a better system.

  | And still nobody has answered the burning question of why "Dawson_Creek" is 
  | in there. Is that some special timezone where all "Pretty White Kids with 
  | Problems" live? (ref. to Mad TV spoof of same name)

Dawson Creek turns out to be an area of British Columbia, Canada, which had
different timezone rules than Vancouver at some time or other (the details are
in the source files for the zoneinfo database).

This discussion has made it quite clear that the NetBSD mailing list is
not the place to discuss timezone issues - anyone who really cares should
join the tz list (tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov - send subscription requests to
tz-request of course) where the people who really understand these issues
carry out that discussion (it is a low volume list that can get very detailed,
so if you were just wondering about Dawson Creek - don't bother).

kre