Hi,
As daylight-saving time ended in the US today, I discovered that ABCL's interpretation of the CL spec concerning the behavior of 'encode/decode-universal-time' around DST is not the usual one.
The usual interpretation is that when an explicit timezone is not supplied to these calls, DST is selected automatically based on whether it would have been in force (under certain assumptions, e.g., you're not in Arizona) at the time being converted. ABCL's behavior is to convert the time based on whether DST is in force at the time of the call.
I think it's pretty clear that the former interpretation was the intended one, even if the language of the spec is admittedly not as clear as it should have been. SBCL does it that way, CCL does it that way, and I even dug out the Genera 7.2 sources, which I still have lying around, to confirm that it did it that way too.
It looks like the ABCL interpretation was more-or-less intentional since a comment in the code says "adapted from SBCL". Do the ABCL developers feel strongly that this is the correct behavior?
-- Scott