Hi Lex,

It turns out that the interpretation of timezone dbs and calculation of 
times from utc has been (thoroughly) solved by Dave Lewis.  Please take 
a look at: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1076

Several different packages on SM include a TimeStamp class.  As far as 
I can see - its pretty much the same class.  Sadly, its completely 
timezone ignorant.  The package on the above mentioned page 
re-implements the TimeStamp class in terms of Lewis's PointInTime and 
adds support for reading/writing the ISO 8601 date and time formats.

This is working very well for me except that every now and then I pull 
down a package on SM that has a different TimeStamp implementation that 
clobbers mine and I have to reload my package.  This is getting 
annoying.

On Sunday, January 5, 2003, at 12:39  PM, Lex Spoon wrote:
> Also, the ANSI patches do not include much support for real timezone
> calculations.  For example, they don't let you convert a UTC time to an
> eastern US time.  However, note that this kind of calculation is quite
> tough.
>
> At the least, a package supporting this stuff should probably restrict
> itself to the timezone that the machine is running in; every country in
> the world is allowed to have its own timezone regulations, and so
> dealing with arbitrary timezones sounds quite tough....<snip>
>
> I'd be happy to be shown otherwise--ie, that there is a timezone 
> package
> floating around which has tons of support, as opposed to just reading 
> in
> the raw database from disk.  If someone has worked out some thorough
> timezone calculation for Smalltalk, that would certainly be excellent.
>