Drupal Doesn't Work with Daylight Savings Time

A client emailed me saying his Drupal site wasn't adjusting for Daylight Savings Time. This seemed odd since Drupal has a lot of the contributors in the US and Europe, and the project usually pretty good with cross-country issues such as time zones.

After finding a lengthy discussion of applying different time zones to events and a short patch with instructions for applying DST for US users, I finally stumbled upon a post from September 2004 notes that "this isn't all that hard to do" However, the thread degenerates into a lot of bug fixes:

The patch looks good... however, it doesn't take into account the fact that in Australia, DST starts and ends at 2am on Sunday morning

...and pleas:

This is an incredibly useful feature and I would like to see it incorporated into the next release (current release is 4.6.0).

...and later, a measure of resignation:

...the updated list will just have to wait until Drupal 8.

My solution? Adjust the time manually from GMT-8 to GMT-7, which moves the displayed dates from Pacific Standard Time to Pacific Daylight Time. Not perfect, but good enough until there's an official contribution.