Daylight Savings Time

DST sucks, in case you didn't know.

• America doesn't entirely follow it (see Indiana).
• Europe does it on different days, and at 1 a.m. instead of 2 a.m.
• Australia has it reversed from Europe (being down under), but at 2 a.m., and not all the country follows it: apparently there is an Australian Western Daylight Time, but it is not actually used.
• New Zealand's DST -- which started the beginning of October, not the end -- is GMT +1300h. Note that the date line is +1200h and -1200h. Freaks.
• Israel doesn't follow any specific calendar date for DST, but changes it every year by law.
• Iraq follows their own calendar, one I can't be bothered to figure out.

Oh, and there is a lot more, of course, but that's some of the more interesting points to me right now. I've coded up DST-adjustment stuff for Slash, which involves:

• Removing all daylight savings timezones from the list you may select from, and adding them as separate fields to the standard timezones (so you may not select EDT, only EST). Also, a script to move people from old timezones to new ones (some changed names, some were consolidated, etc.).
• Adding a new table for dst "regions", which currently are America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. These comprise a set of numbers that describe when DST begins and ends for that "region." Each timezone with a corresponding daylight savings timezone may have a DST region, so DST may be automatically adjusted for users with that timezone.
• Adding a new preference to select that DST is adjusted Automatically, or is Manually On, or is Manually Off. So for you people in Israel, you can just select Eastern Europe time and then adjust Manual On/Off for yourself.
• Then there's the code, that on authentication, will check the current time against the timezone and region you are in and see if you should be in DST, and if so, adjusts your offset and timezone accordingly (EST/-18000 -> EDT/-14400) .
• For selected timezones that have no "region," DST will not be set automatically, but may be set manually. If the timezone has no corresponding daylight savings timezone, and Manual On is selected, then a default of +3600 is used for the offset adjustment.

This will be going live today, and hopefully will kick in this weekend for those of us in Australian, European, and American timezones.

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