[Zope3-dev] Strawman Proposal: Timezone as a location

[Patrick K. O'Brien]

In an effort to help simplify the requirements for datetime, I am putting
forth a strawman proposal that some notion of timezone be treated as
equivalent to a mapped location on the world. In other words, there is a
one-to-one correspondence between a timezone code and a place on the earth.
Likewise, no place on the earth belongs in more than one timezone at any
given point in time.

I would argue that this notion of timezone location should be stored with a
datetimetz object, in addition to tzoffset and tzname. (Perhaps tzlocation?)
There should be 25 valid values ranging from -12 to +12. Simple date
calculations would not alter the timezone location value.

In support of this argument, here are links to various timezone maps.

Free (as in GPL) World and US Time Zones:
http://www.manifold.net/download/freemaps.html

Standard Time Zones Of The World, according to the United States Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA):
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ref/pdf/802801.pdf

Feel free to shoot holes in this. :-)

---
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech