[tz] 'date -u' should say "UTC", not "GMT"

Matt Johnson mj1856 at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 24 21:07:07 UTC 2014


I think there are other places affected by this also.  Where I noticed was in the CLDR, as discussed here:http://stackoverflow.com/a/24395573/634824

> Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:02:10 -0700
> From: eggert at cs.ucla.edu
> To: tz at iana.org
> CC: mj1856 at hotmail.com
> Subject: 'date -u' should say "UTC", not "GMT"
> 
> Come to think of it, the tz implementation of 'date -u' should say "UTC" 
> instead of "GMT", and in general the tz code and documentation should 
> prefer UT or UTC to GMT whenever this would improve technical accuracy.  
> Although "GMT" is the traditional time zone abbreviation output of 'date 
> -u', POSIX has allowed "UTC" ever since IEEE Std 1003.1-1992.  
> Outputting "UTC" is more technically correct, certainly for time stamps 
> since 1961, and arguably even before that if one interprets "UTC" 
> proleptically.  Also, outputting "UTC" is now a quite-common behavior, 
> since it's the standard behavior in GNU/Linux.  So I'll look into 
> proposing a patch to the tz code to have it support this behavior.  
> There are probably a few other places in the code that should also 
> prefer "UT" or "UTC" to "GMT".
 		 	   		  
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