[tz] LST

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ.AU
Fri Oct 14 03:29:52 UTC 2011


    Date:        Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:18:48 -0400
    From:        Tim Parenti <tim at timtimeonline.com>
    Message-ID:  <CAFpi07wtWH_Sjh06QZ=X=Yp7qoto6Z+0zRQEnXh5Se_R5SZdvA at mail.gmail.com>

  | Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe most robust implementations of the TZ
  | database already have some way of expressing an offset in this way.

That isn't the issue.  What is of interest for this topic, is what the
tz database (and code) should put in the tzname[] array &/or tm_zone field
of the struct tm.

Confusing that with what anyone would ever use to select a timezone, or
identify one, or anything else useful at all, just muddies the waters.

Personally, I'd have no great problem with putting some numeric zone
indicator in place of the abbreviation, but apparently that might confuse
some code that parses the output from the date command (and perhaps a few
other similar things) and which expect that the abbreviation will be all
alphabetic.

Opting for caution when changing things is what this project has always
done, and I see no reason to alter that policy, so I would not break
anyone's code by altering the policy that the zone abbreviation
(tzname[] or tm_zone) is a short alphabetic string (even an upper case
short alphabetic string.)

So, using -04:00 just isn't an option, sorry.

LST, or LT, or almost anything else like that is possible - there's no need
for it not to be ambiguous, or to be useful, that's already a lost cause,
just for it to be syntactically consistent with current expectations.

kre




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