[tz] Idea for internationalized time point unique time zone abbreviations

Ian Abbott abbotti at mev.co.uk
Wed Jun 6 15:56:20 UTC 2012


On 2012-06-06 16:51, Ian Abbott wrote:
> On 2012-06-06 16:35, Boruch Baum wrote:
>> - From my perspective, it would be best if nl_langinfo would be extended
>> to include timezone names and abbreviations. That would make it
>> trivial to write code that would portable across all locales, and
>> would be able to auto-magically accept timezone names and
>> abbreviations in the user's selected locale.
>>
>> Of course, nl_langinfo just picks up data from locale definition
>> files, so this still would mean each locale having a complete set of
>> entries for each timezone name and abbreviation (just as each dos now
>> month names, days of week).
>
> I guess the main problem here is that the week-day names and month names
> (in the Gregorian/Julian calendar system) are known internally by glibc,
> whereas timezone names and abbreviations are external to glibc (and are
> also a bit of a moving target).

Even worse, the user can change the abbreviations to anything she likes 
by setting the TZ environment variable and calling tzset().  How would 
_that_ get localized?

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk>        )=-
-=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898   FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587         )=-


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