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by dpcx 1239 days ago
My understanding is that you don't even want to store them as UTC and always store them in the timezone of the user/system that generated the data since you lose some information in the translation from local timezone to UTC - given that the timezone database changes, you may actually want to know that the record created in Fiji before 2022-10-28[1] was stored in DST so that it can be properly converted to the new Fiji time.

[1]: https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/NEWS
2 comments
bouke 1239 days ago
This! People mistake the offset for the timezone, which is incorrect. The offset isn't very useful other than a guestimate of the originating timezone.
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cratermoon 1239 days ago
Ideally store both, UTC and original local time, or at least the original TZ information. Time and timezone are a huge mess and one of the worst things to try deal with in programming.
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