[threeten-dev] 64bit tzdata?

[Masayoshi Okutsu]

On 12/19/2012 4:14 AM, yoshito_umaoka at us.ibm.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As far as I know, current Java releases use 32bit tzdata (effective
> between 1901-12-13T20:45:52Z and 2038-01-19T03:14:07Z)

JDK uses SimpleTimeZone for DST rules with "max" beyond 2038. It doesn't 
have problems with future dates except for the limitations coming from 
the SimpleTimeZone API.

>   and offsets
> returned by java.util.TimeZone for dates before 1900 does not match the tz
> database in many cases.

There were some customer codes which assumed consistent GMT offsets for 
old dates. In other words, apps assumed the SimpleTimeZone-based time 
zone support. I didn't want to break those apps back in 2000, which is 
the reason why JDK didn't introduce support for LMT.

Actually I don't know why JDK 1.1 introduced SimpleTimeZone for time 
zone support when the Olson tzdata was available. The first time I saw 
the Olson tzdata-based time zone support it was on Ultrix. :-)

Masayoshi