[tz] [PROPOSED] Be more consistent about UT vs UTC

Philip Paeps philip at trouble.is
Tue Nov 7 17:08:34 UTC 2017


On 2017-11-06 22:43:33 (-0800), Paul Eggert wrote:
>* NEWS, africa, asia, australasia, europe, localtime.c:
>* newctime.3, newtzset.3, northamerica, southamerica, theory.html:
>* tz-link.htm, tzselect.ksh, zdump.c, zic.8, zic.c:
>Be more consistent about using "UT" instead of "UTC" when talking
>about timestamps that might predate the introduction of UTC.

I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to simply note "where we write UTC, we
actually mean UT when referring to timestamps before UTC was 
introduced".

While UTC is comparatively poorly understood, UT is simply unknown to 
anyone who hasn't been reading tzdata diffs or hanging out with time 
nerds for a while.

Also worth considering, where 'output' is concerned, people expect 
"timezones" to be in the form of "UTC+-XXXXXX" and "UT" may be 
confusing.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information


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