[tz] 'date -u' should say "UTC", not "GMT"

Steve Allen sla at ucolick.org
Tue Jun 24 21:19:20 UTC 2014


On Tue 2014-06-24T14:02:10 -0700, Paul Eggert hath writ:
> So I'll look into proposing a patch to the tz code to
> have it support this behavior.  There are probably a few other
> places in the code that should also prefer "UT" or "UTC" to "GMT".

That's a good convention for tz to adopt.

At the moment there are probably more bureaucrats stressing over
aspects of this than ever in history.  No answer can conform to the
legal systems of the world because the answer depends on who you ask,
which country you live in, which language you speak in that country.
It gets very confusing and is definitely tl;dr, but see
preprint 11-662 at
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/2011/preprints/index.html
and preprint 13-505 at
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/preprints/index.html
for some investigations into how confused the answer gets.

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