Possible Timezone bug

[lorentz]

I noticed that setting the time zone to US/Pacific and GMT-7 are different. Why is that the case? It’s currently Daylight Savings Time, meaning that the US pacific coast is GMT-7 instead of GMT-8. If I change the setting to US/Pacific I have 0 reviews. If I change it to GMT-7 I have 28 reviews.

I could maybe understand if US/Pacific is some kind of weird floating timezone because the definition changes every 6 months. This isn’t a big deal, but just wondering if this is somehow intended behavior or if it reveals a bug in the scheduler.

[phil]

@lorentz

that setting the time zone to US/Pacific and GMT-7 are different. Why is that the case?

You aren’t alone – I would expect that to work too.

For whatever reason these GMT offset time zones have the plus/minus mean the opposite

The comment below the accepted answer clarifies:

Understand:

• An offset-from-UTC is simply a number of hours-minutes-seconds, ahead of the baseline of UTC, or behind UTC.
• A time zone is much more. A time zone is a history of the past, present, and future changes to the offset used by the people of a particular region.

These “GMT+X” are time zones, and thus come with this strange baggage of reversing the signs to codify the offset.

So, in the case, you would want to select GMT+7 to line up with US/Pacific.

Here’s a list of all of the time zones – if you search up “GMT+7” you’ll see the offset of -7 hours, matching US/Pacific.

Sure is confusing though not sure if we could do something on our end to make it less confusing