I agree with Pavel. Japan also may be adapting daylight savings
time sooner or later, so it might be a good idea to work on
timezone-related problems in core Ruby soon.

Updates of timezone information doesn't have to be frequent,
for most purposes (work in a locality that doesn't change
timezone rules), even no update is okay. To keep current
for timezones world-wide, an update about once a month
should be more than enough; governments change timezone rules
at their will, but do it well in advance.

In general, it is difficult if not impossible to provide a
time class that satisfies everybody from business people
to astronomers and historians (and is still easy to use
by programmers). But we should be open to improvements.

Regards,    Martin.

On 2009/03/20 23:26, valodzka wrote:
>> I think Ruby should not include timezone database because
>> its maintainance.
>
> AFAIK, there are a plans to distribute ruby core libraries as a gems.
> So, tz database can be packed as a gem, so it can be updated
> immediately after new version.
>> However it may be considerable to extend Time to hold arbitrary time
>> offset from UTC, as DateTime:
> This is partial solution, it doesn't solve main problem, but it is of
> course better then current situation.
> --
> Pavel
>
>
>