[tz] Why is `Etc/UCT` not an alias of `Etc/UTC`?

[Guy Harris]

On Mar 5, 2019, at 3:21 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> On 3/5/19 3:07 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
>> Is there any information about whether "UTC" or "UCT" is the more commonly used abbreviation in documents in English?
> 
> "UTC" is far more common. For example, for me Google reports about 4,220
> hits for the query "Universal Coordinated Time (UCT)" and about
> 1,080,000 hits for "Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)". For Google
> Scholar the numbers are 210 and 11,800 respectively. For Google Books
> they are 493 and 12,500 respectively. In all cases the double-quote
> characters were in the query.
> 
> My vague impression is that "UCT" was formerly more popular than it is
> now, but it's never been as popular as "UTC".

As I suspected.

So, yes, if Etc/UTC were to be an alias for Etc/UCT, and thus gave UTC as the abbreviation, there would probably be a lot of pushback.

If, however, Etc/UCT were an alias for Etc/UTC, it would give UTC as the abbreviation, and there might not be much pushback from that.