[tz] Ambiguous abbreviations for Australian timezones when daylight savings is in affect

Stuart Bishop stuart at stuartbishop.net
Sun Mar 31 06:24:16 UTC 2013


On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 3:12 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> On 03/29/13 10:01, David Patte ₯ wrote:
>> lets at least adopt the national one
>
> If I recall correctly, the last time I checked,
> different parts of the Australian national government
> used different terminology and/or abbreviations and
> nobody seemed to be in charge.

Correct. There is no higher authority on Australian timezone
abbreviations than the tz database maintainer. The most authoritative
source of information for Australians (and most of the world) is what
their computers tell them. For Australians without computers, the next
most authoritative sources would be debatable but I imagine they would
be the ABC (National Broadcaster, who you quote from 1942) followed by
the Bureau of Meteorology. The State or Federal Governments would be
way down the list.

I'm afraid you are in a leadership position here. Setting the bar so
high as 'until everyone is in agreement' or even 'all parts of the
government are in agreement' means it will never happen. I don't think
it is sane to think that a federal government, seven state
governments, a couple of territories, thousands of municipalities, and
an uncountable number of government departments could even agree on
the day of the week. If  the position really is that it will never
change, just make a statement to that effect so we can petition our OS
providers to patch the database and move on.


-- 
Stuart Bishop <stuart at stuartbishop.net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/



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