Matplotlib X-axis timezone trouble

[Peter Pearson]

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015 17:01:15 +1000, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 2:49 PM, Peter Pearson
><pkpearson at nowhere.invalid> wrote:
>> Time zones teem with sneaky software problems, and so does daylight-saving
>> time, so this problem might strain my brain.  Maybe it's going to turn
>> out that my expectations are unreasonable . . . as in, "Well, smarty pants,
>> how do you want the axis labelled when the abscissas straddle the
>> beginning of daylight-saving time?"  I'll research and digest.
>
> That's entirely possible. Even more so if you go across some other
> civil time change - if you look at the history of timezones in tzdata,
> there's no end of messes as different places adopted standard time,
> redefined standard time, and unified with someone else's standard
> time. And some of that happened relatively recently.
>
> UTC is much easier for this kind of thing. Especially if the
> granularity of your data lets you ignore leap seconds.

Hear, hear!  I'm an enthusiastic fan of UTC.  But I need to interact
with nontechnical people who will say, "Hey, I logged that widget at
9AM, why do you show it as 4PM?"  Another funny thing that happens in
the pure-UTC world is my software gets confused by the way Frank
abruptly shifts his logging schedule by an hour ... twice a year ...
when DST starts or stops.

I'm just glad I don't have to worry about the distinctions among 
UTC, GMT, TAI, and UT1.

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