Updated Australian time zone names/strings

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ.AU
Tue Apr 17 05:48:05 UTC 2001


    Date:        Tue, 17 Apr 2001 10:52:24 +1000
    From:        Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net>
    Message-ID:  <nospam-987468745.32363 at maxim.gbch.net>

  | This is a kind of chicken/egg problem: because the tzdata files
  | don't offer AEST and friends, people have to jump through hoops
  | to use them; most don't bother.

Back in 1993 there was almost no use of the tz database, that was still
comparatively early in its development (the 93b set of data is the oldest
one I have managed to save).   Before then, people set the timezone name
in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways.

  | Certainly, if I could have one of these to use as an alternative
  | to "Australia/Brisbane", that would be an acceptable compromise.

When I saw ado's message, before seeing your reply, I was going to reply
and say that I didn't think that would work for you at all - that is, your
primary aim seemed to be to be able to sort incoming mail where the timezone
string was "EST" and you knew it was from somewhere in Eastern Aust, rather
than eastern north America.   To achieve that you need to somehow get other
people to use a tz abbreviation that you like, creating tz db entries with
exotic names and different abbreviations is unlikely to achieve that,
people in Sydney are still going to pick Australia/Sydney 99 times out of
a hundred.

For your own use there has never been a problem, you have always been able
to alter the TZ abbreviations that you use to anything that you would like
them to be.

Personally, I don't care if a few extra zones are created with wacky
abbreviations - I don't think they'll change anything, except make the
tz database that little bit bigger (and that's not a real problem).

kre




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