Re: a bug in date concerning daylight saving time

[Lao DanTong]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007, John Cowan wrote:

> That looks exactly right to me.  2007-10-14 means 2007-10-14T00:00:00, but
> that second does not exist in any timezone observing the "Brazil" rules:
> time jumps directly from 2007-10-13T23:59:59 to 2007-10-14T01:00:00.
> Internal evidence shows that the timezone in your examples is
> America/Sao_Paulo, but this rule set also applies to America/Campo_Grande
> and America/Cuiaba, the only other two Brazilian time zones currently
> observing DST.

Yes, it's America/Sao_Paulo.

This semantics makes sense, however I think the 'old' behaviour of date is 
much more practical:

$ date --date=2007-10-14
Sun Oct 14 01:00:00 BRST 2007

that is to interpret 2007-10-14 as 2007-10-14T01:00:00, i.e., the very 
first second of that day.

> Maybe you want to argue that dates without times should mean the first
> second of the day rather than 00:00:00.

Yes. this makes a lot of sense, don't you think? Notice that date reports 
illegal date for a date specification like --date=2007-10-14+2hours, which 
should be legal and render as 2007-10-14T03:00:00