[tz] Reason for removal of several TZ

Thomas M Steenholdt tmus at tmus.dk
Mon Dec 4 02:04:27 UTC 2017


Paul Eggert wrote:
> Thomas M Steenholdt wrote:
>> WGT/WGST seems to be a widely accepted abbreviation for the West
>> Greenland Time zone.
>
> As far as I can see, it's an invented abbreviation propagated from
> tzdata, and there isn't much independent support for it. I've been
> trying to omit these inventions, as tzdata should record timekeeping
> not invent it.

I totally agree. I just never thought this was something invented or
unofficial - I've always used these.

I have gathered a few sources that mention WGT/WGST, but I honestly have
no clue if these are based of off tzdata (which could very well be the
case) or something else.:

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/wgt
https://www.worldtimeserver.com/time-zones/wgt/
http://www.prokerala.com/travel/timezones/Western_Greenland_Time
http://www.datetime360.com/timezone-wgt/
https://www.worlddata.info/timezones/wgt-west-greenland-time.php

In any case I can't help feeling, that with all this "knowledge" out
there, removing the WGT/WGST timezone abbreviations from tzdata seems
wrong. These are the TZ abbreviations that we work with on a daily basis
up here (I'm in Nuuk, Greenland) and suddenly they are unknown in our
favorite timezone data.

So I'm more inclined to try to somehow make these abbreviations
official. I just need to know where to start.

>> the removal causes certain things to go belly up
>
> Which things went belly up? Details might be helpful.

>From what I've seen, PHP (on Ubuntu) had some hiccups and started
mentioning Sao Paolo in my date/time outputs, because WGT/WGST was
suddenly missing:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tzdata/+bug/1734967

A few of my own scripts that convert time between timezones started
misbehaving as they expect WGT and WGST to be valid abbreviations. This
is easy to fix, but there could be (and probably is) other places where
this could cause problems.

/Thomas


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