[systemd-devel] Specifying calendar events in an arbitrary timezone

[Ran Benita]

I would like to schedule some timers to execute daily at a given time in
some given timezone. My use-case for this is:

- The server's local timezone is UTC - this is just good practice for
  various reasons, so I don't want to change that.

- For business reasons, the service I want to run needs to run at the
  given time in the given timezone. Since that timezone switches
  daylight saving twice a year, I cannot specify the time in UTC, since
  it will become 1 hour off when the local time changes.

systemd does not allow to specify a calendar event in a non-local,
non-UTC timezone. This is explictly specified in systemd.time(7):

    Non-local timezones except for UTC are not supported.

My question: is this not supported on purpose (because timezones suck),
or because it's just not implemented/hard to implement?

If it's on purpose, I can relate - in a local timezone, the event can
occur 0, 1 or 2 times, which is not good. However, since systemd already
supports the local timezone, I think this battle is already lost. So we
can say that the behavior for an arbitrary timezone is the same as if it
were the local timezone.