[tz] [PROPOSED] Rename internal identifiers to match RFC 8536

[Guy Harris]

On Jun 17, 2019, at 12:12 PM, Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> wrote:

> Isn't it obvious that this is more fiddling for the sake of fiddling?

No, it's not.

Isn't it obvious that comments are *not* part of any specified interface? 

The zic(8) *man page*, which is *far* closer to anything that might be deemed a guarantee offered by the tzdb project than *comments* in the tzdb source files, used to call that column GMTOFF:

     A zone line has the form:
           Zone NAME GMTOFF    RULES/SAVE     FORMAT    [UNTILYEAR [MONTH [DAY
           [TIME]]]]
     For example:
           Zone Australia/Adelaide  9:30 Aus  CST  1971 Oct 31 2:00
     The fields that make up a zone line are:

     NAME    The name of the time zone.  This is the name used in creating the
             time conversion information file for the zone.

     GMTOFF  The amount of time to add to UTC to get standard time in this
             zone.  This field has the same format as the AT and SAVE fields
             of rule lines; begin the field with a minus sign if time must be
             subtracted from UTC.

but was changed in 2018 to call it UTOFF:

	commit 238ed326c6b0d73727a8269afc5ed32fa9c3dcd2
	Author: Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu>
	Date:   Mon Jun 18 17:47:42 2018 -0700

	    Merge some changes from man-pages project
    
	    Make some minor formatting changes to be more like man-pages.
	    * tzfile.5: Break a line the same place that man-pages does.
	    * zdump.8, zic.8: Use bold, not italics, for command and function
	    names.  Do not capitalize command names.  Add a section header
	    OPTIONS.  Document --help.  Fix some problems with fonts.  Don’t
	    quote "SEE ALSO", and don’t mention newctime(3).
	    Put FILES before NOTES, and format a la man-pages.
	    * zic.8: Also, do some fixes of our own, noticed while merging the
	    above.  Use real life US Rule, not an invented one.  Write
	    “UTOFF”, not “GMTOFF” (man-pages used “UTCOFF” but it’s not808
	    necessarily UTC either).  Quote more carefully.

If these changes make it clearer what the column represents, that may be worth whatever churn is involved.