Uncertain usage/scope of a possibly standard timezone name 'MEZ-1MSZ'
Martin Jerabek
martin.jerabek at isis-papyrus.com
Tue Oct 21 07:41:19 UTC 2008
On 20.10.2008 20:53, Andy Lipscomb wrote:
> That said, abbreviations of the form MEZ-1MSZ-2 or CET-1CEST you provide would refer to a time zone that never really existed--one that had used UTC/GMT plus one hour, or plus two in periods governed by current EU summer-time rules, back to the beginning of time (pun intended).
The offset in a POSIX TZ value (-1) indicates the number of hours which
must be added to the local time to arrive at UTC. See
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html
Since Central European time is one (standard time) or two (daylight
saving time) hours ahead of UTC, subtracting 1 or 2 hours is correct, so
CET-1CEST is a correct POSIX description of the Central European time
zone. One could also write CET-1CEST-2 but the additional one hour
offset for daylight saving time is the default value and can be omitted.
Being from Europe/Vienna myself, I can confirm that I know MESZ
("Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit", Central European Summer Time) but not
MSZ. The German Wikipedia article on Summer Time
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sommerzeit) gives MEZ ("Mitteleuropäische
Zeit", Central European Time) as the official abbreviation for standard
time and the following abbreviations for daylight saving time:
- MESZ: Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit
- CEST: Central European Summer Time
- CETDST: Central European Time/Daylight Saving Time
So in a nutshell I would conclude that MSZ is obviously a contraction of
MESZ intended to mean Central European Summer Time. It is not official,
and not prevalent at least in my region but maybe someone from Germany
can offer more on their perspective.
Regards
Martin Jerabek
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