After my last week's email on timezones I have come to the decision that it
is far more sensible to cease using fixed offsets from UTC (e.g. +2:00) and
to use the proper zones e.g. "Europe/London".

After doing some reading up on the subject as I am not too familiar with it,
I understand that it is necessary to keep the local DB up-to-date, for PHP
this comes in the form of PECL's timezonedb.

Since we distribute PHP as a part of a larger product, we would be
responsible for keeping this up-to-date - so what I need to know is:
* where does the php_timezonedb.dll need to be located and does it need to
be in php.ini - I can't find mention of the file in the default installation
* how often would we actually need to update the DB - PECL says "You should
only install this extension in case you need to get a later version of the
timezone database than the one that ships with PHP." - does this imply that
we might actually be fine to continue using the default installed DB for the
foreseeable future?

I'd appreciate any guidance on this - TIA.
--rob