Hey all.
I know with Perl "there's more than one way to do it", but I'd rather
not reinvent the wheel...
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/
contains files like GMT-5 or GMT+8 etc which would be really handy for
me to tweak $ENV{'TZ'} to play with dates and times, but I'm trying to
find the 'best' approach to handle this scenario:
- user adds a meeting time in local time (Pacific time) which is
stored in MySQL
- when another user logs in, they see the time converted to their own
TZ offset, which is configured based on their country
(in the case where their country has multiple TZ's, they are asked
what time it is at their location to help my script determine their
offset relative to UTC)
I have Date::Manip at my disposal, but not sure of the 'best' approach
for handling this work, or if that library is even best suited for
this.
FYI: Server's timezone is set to UTC... figured it was easiest that
way?
My thoughts are this:
- use Date::Manip to see if the current date/time is between 2am on
the first Sunday of April or 2am on the last Sunday of October (1986's
mandated rules for US daylight savings time)
- meeting time/day-of-week is manipulated using Date::Manip's
&ParseDate() subroutine with "+ 7 hours" or "+ 8 hours", accordingly,
and stored in the database (MySQL as DATETIME field type)
- when another user logs in, I know their offset relative to UTC, but
have no 'rules' for determining whether they too are affected by DST
or not, as these users will be world-wide... and that's my roadblock -
if they are affected by DST as well, I need another way to convert the
time/date of the meeting accordingly.
/usr/share/zoneinfo/ may not be useful considering our end users may
not know which zone file to pick from a list if (for example) I just
list all of the files within the /Asia/ folder, and they live in
Moscow, since Moscow is not listed in the /Asia/ folder. (it's listed
in /Europe/ but last time I checked a map, Russia was part of Asia)
So I'm stuck with a user-friendly way of showing my users what time a
meeting is at in their local time since I'm not confident of how best
to determine whether DST affects their TZ offset from GMT.
The other drawback with /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/ is that there are no
"half hour" files, such as Newfoundland time in Canada, which is an
extra half hour ahead of Atlantic time.
Any feedback, insight, perldoc references, or example code would be
most welcomed.
-g*****@w98.us
