[arohner]

Not really. On *nixes, there's a library called zoneinfo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database) that has the list of rules about "if you're in living in California, then DST starts on March 23" or whatever. When a country changes the law about when DST is, that data needs to be updated.

For example, last year Chile gave a month's notice that daylight savings time was changing. (http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/chile-extends-dst-2010....)

That can cause headaches, if you have a mission critical system that needs to be updated, otherwise it may do something important an hour early, or an hour late. For example, Postgres has to be rebooted when the timezone information is changed.