hubject / oicp

Open intercharge Protocol
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Time Zones: UTC offset vs. named time zones #30

Open Namoshek opened 3 years ago

Namoshek commented 3 years ago

Currently, the time zone of an EVSE can be given in the address object in form of a UTC offset, e.g. UTC+02:00. Especially in Central Europe, where most countries are using a different UTC offset for summer time, this comes with the drawback that published data becomes inaccurate the moment we change our clocks.

I therefore suggest switching to named time zones as they can be found in the list of tz database time zones which is published by IANA.

Such an API change could in theory be (mostly) backwards and forwards compatible, since for most countries there is only one timezone and a simple mapping from country to time zone and vice versa is already sufficient.