Timezone naming

[J Wunsch]

As Janis.Papanagnou at PC-Plus.DE wrote:

> Markus wrote:

> > Consequently: Only humans have to recognize the time zone abbreviation
> > and it definitely does not make sense here to use one that does not
> > follow common practice (Langenscheid, PTB, SkyTV, CNN, etc.).
> 
> That's the point, humans should be provided a user-friendly naming scheme.
> But I cannot second your conclusions.  The US time zone "names" are very
> strange (to me!), but I don't care - it's not my domain, I have not to use
> them.  CNN, etc. is not what I would call common practice; in DE I hear
> the terms MEZ (or MET).  I am not talking with the PTB, nor do I inform
> myself by US broadcasts.

Hah!  You thought i already gave up?  No, only deferred...

About a month ago, i started a small vote in de.comp.os.unix, that is
the projected target people that will be most affected by your
decision.  (Btw., Markus later sent a followup letter there, and got
one very interesting (from my point of view :) followup today, so
people understanding German might want to read it there.)

Anyway, the question i've asked the people was basically: ``Do you
prefer the technically more correct term CET, the historically used
MET, or don't you care?''  Note that i _did not_ intend to go into any
technical debate about this, as i've indicated previously that i might
agree that CET is technically more correct, but this is IMHO not the
only point to consider.  (Today's followup article even questions the
technical correctness.)

So here is the result:

j at uriah 514% foreach file ( /home/vote/[A-Z]* )
foreach? printf "%10s: " `basename $file`; cat $file; tr -d ' ' < $file | wc -c
foreach? end
       CET:  X          X      XXx  X   XX         8
      Egal:          X    X   X   x                4
       MET: x XXXxXXX XX X XxX     x XXX  Xx      20

This basically indicates that your timezone name change is mostly
unwelcome among those people who finally have to live with it.  Go
figure.

(The vote ran for a period of 8 or 10 days.  Given the usual traffic
in de.comp.os.unix, 32 participiants aren't too bad.  Needless to say,
i didn't vote myself.)

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch at uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)