[tz] Add ISO Phonetic and Letter Time Zone Links to etcetera

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Sep 9 19:37:40 UTC 2019


On 9/9/19 9:04 AM, Brian Inglis wrote:

> Note that Etc/Zulu is already created as a Link from Etc/UTC, the names India
> and Quebec do not already exist in any directories, while America/Lima (Peru)
> already exists.
Adding Etc/India, Etc/Lima, and Etc/Quebec would be confusing, as people 
would likely confuse these with the geographical names in other 
directories. And although we could replace these confusing names with 
inventions of our own (just as airports with a lot of Delta flights 
routinely replace "Delta" with "Data" or suchlike to avoid confusion 
when spelling out letters), using alternate names would make things even 
more confusing. Plus, the militaries of the world don't agree on the 
spellings of the words: for example, the US military commonly uses 
"Alpha" whereas the NATO standard is "Alfa". Also, there's the confusion 
from the fact that Internet RFC 822 got these zones backwards; RFC 822's 
successors washed their hands of the mess and say that military zone 
abbreviations should be ignored.

People who want fixed-hour time zones can use something like 
TZ="<-07>7", and there should be little practical need for more aliases. 
If we were to make changes in this area, I think I might prefer going 
the other way and removing Etc entirely, as everything in Etc is either 
confusing or redundant.


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