March-November is actually a 'recent' change (2005/7):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Chan...

Previously it was April-October: 6/12.

Some of us IT folks lived through updating all the various TZ files, which was quite an experience since a lot of things were not designed to be updated dynamically at the time.

So what? It is 8/12 months of the year in DST now, and has been for well over a decade. That's the current baseline and all current daily schedules are definitely adjusted to it by now. Moving to permanent standard time would thus have a distortionary effect on 8/12 months of the year, vs only 4/12 months of the year for moving to permanent daylight saving time.

> distortionary effect

The distortions come from the time jump.

If we got rid of that, then the changes in the sun's key position, sunrises/sets, and shadows through-out the day would simply shift as the seasons do: gradually.

After the "final jump" people won't notice things IMHO.

I'm talking about something different, which is the actual current timing of the day/night cycle relative to people's daily schedules. I'm assuming daily schedules (e.g. show up at work at 9, leave at 6) won't change, so the distortionary effect would be on 8 months of the year by changing to permanent standard rather than only on 4 months of the year by changing to permanent DST. This means that e.g. the available sunlight on my bike commutes to/from work would be changed in 8 months out of the year from what they are now by switching to perma-standard, vs only 4 months out of the year by switching to perma-DST. Schedules for things that rely on day/night cycles would thus be more disrupted by being upended for fully twice as much of the year with perma-standard as with perma-DST.

I had an Oracle RAC cluster and a number of PeopleSoft servers that were incredibly difficult to get successfully patched for that change.

The other super annoying thing about it is it created a window at the beginning and end of DST where the US is out of sync with most of Europe.

I never understood how it came to be that the two biggest economic blocks with a ton of business between them didn’t manage to align on this. Thank you for finally giving me the context.

I lived through the DST change and it was hell. Some servers got the Java update, some didn't....ugh.

Java tzdata is now a separate thing probably because of this:

* https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/tzupdater-re...

Keep the JRE/JDK the same to reduce the risk of code behaviour changes, but allow updates of the 'dynamic' data.