[tz] [PATCH] Change abbreviation of Sri Lanka standard time to SLST

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Wed Oct 19 10:15:02 UTC 2016


On Oct 19, 2016, at 3:02 AM, John Haxby <john.haxby at oracle.com> wrote:

> tzdb deals in timezones, it doesn't deal in localized timezone names.
> Localized timezone names come from CLDR (http://cldr.unicode.org/).
> So, for example, the date in Berlin right now is
> 
>   Wed 19 Oct 11:13:56 CEST 2016
> 
> That's English abbreviations and an English timezone name because I'm
> English.   If the timezone name was "MESZ" I would be somewhat confused.
> If I was German then I'd expect the time to be displayed as
> 
>   Mi 19. Okt 11:13:56 MESZ 2016

Although, unfortunately:

	$ sw_vers
	ProductName:    Mac OS X
	ProductVersion: 10.11.6
	BuildVersion:   15G1004
	$ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 TZ=Europe/Berlin date
	Mi 19 Okt 2016 10:54:31 CEST

even though the CLDR appears to have MESZ in common/main/de.xml; as I remember, Apple haven't modified the tzcode-derived *BSD code for handling time zones in the UNIX API, so the "date" command doesn't give you translated abbreviations - some of the Core Foundation or Cocoa frameworks might have APIs that will.

> The timezone abbreviation isn't actually translated on Linux because
> glibc (which is responsible for the translation) doesn't localize
> timezone names.

As with Linux, so with macOS (*mutatis mutants*, as it doesn't use glibc), at least at the UNIX API level, and probably so with *BSD.  I can't speak for Solaris, AIX, or HP-UX.


More information about the tz mailing list