[tz] [PATCH 0/2] Follow Australian common usage and update CST/CST to CST/CDT and EST/EST to EST/EDT etc [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[David Patte ₯]

I believe both Timothy and I prefer prefer AEST over EST, but it is a 
different issue than the Daylight saving time ambiguity issue, so we 
agreed that we we should probably make only the minimal changes that 
resolved the Daylight ambiguity issue with the least changes, since it 
was more likely to be a proposal that would be accepted into tz. We 
changed only the daylight time abbreviations to end the ambiguity.

But if the tz maintainers believe that using AEST instead of EST would 
at the same time help resolve historical ambiguities caused by older 
versions of the tz database, I am sure we could re-roll the proposal to 
better suite the preferences of the maintainers.

Until then, what our little sub-committee has proposed will likely stand 
as is.

On 2013-04-12 7:16, Ian Abbott wrote:
> On 2013-04-11 17:53, Dennis Ferguson wrote:
>> I would note, however, that the proposed patch doesn't just limit itself
>> to reducing the ambiguity of future timestamps not yet recorded, it also
>> changes the database information about the abbreviations used for 
>> historical
>> timestamps produced by the TZ database.  While the issue of what time 
>> zone
>> abbreviations people in Australia might have preferred to use is for 
>> others
>> to debate there can be no dispute about the abbreviations the TZ 
>> database
>> has used for the last 20 years, nor is there any way to change that, but
>> by altering that data one is effectively removing the information 
>> about the
>> history of the database itself that one would need to know to interpret
>> timestamps already recorded with the "unwitting use" of the TZ database.
>
> That's all the more reason to add the 'A' prefix to the new 
> abbreviations, I think, just so it's easier to tell if an old date 
> string is using the old abbreviation or the new one.
>


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