I worked on software that did this. Well prior to my starting there they defined “ET”, “CT”, “MT”, “PT” as the time zones you could set for a client.
Internally these had to be mapped to _real_ identifiers (aka America/New_York and friends). This fell apart though when Mexico (where we had some clients) shifted their DST dates about 2 weeks off from the US DST change.
The first time this happened all times were just off for 2 weeks. It caught everyone by surprise but trying to fix it would have been more dangerous than letting it be due to the nature of the software.
After we got past that, did we overhaul the system to use full identifiers in our config? Nope, we added “CT (Mexico)”. Timezones suck.
Internally these had to be mapped to _real_ identifiers (aka America/New_York and friends). This fell apart though when Mexico (where we had some clients) shifted their DST dates about 2 weeks off from the US DST change.
The first time this happened all times were just off for 2 weeks. It caught everyone by surprise but trying to fix it would have been more dangerous than letting it be due to the nature of the software.
After we got past that, did we overhaul the system to use full identifiers in our config? Nope, we added “CT (Mexico)”. Timezones suck.