[drupal-support] Drupal Time Zones / DST

[Mark Shropshire]

I was wondering what the best way to handle Daylight Savings Time in Drupal.
I am moving to 4.6 so you can assume that is what we are talking about :)


Here is what I am currently doing:
1. I have user configurable time zones turned off.
2. I set the size wide time zone to GMT-500 when not in Daylight Savings
Time.
3. When DST started in April, to make the site times look correct, I had to
change the time zone of my sites to GMT-400.

A few questions on the above:
1. Is this the best way to handle or is there a better way? I am actually
telling Drupal that I am in a different time zone (-400) which is not true
so it seem like a hack to get it to show the correct time..
2. Will this cause me any problems? It seems that it will affect the times
of old posts.. 
3. Why does Drupal not have a checkbox to tell the system that the site
follows DST like most operating systems do?

There is a lot of talk about timezone related issues on drupal.org..so much
so that I wasn't sure what applied to my questions and what didn't ..also
what issues are not old issues not related to 4.6. Post date/times are more
of annoyance..probably not a huge deal even if I left the time zone and the
time was wrong part of the year, but this will cause me problems with the
events module which I really really like!

Thanks!
Mark