[tz] suggestion: split "backward" into "backward" and "deprecated"

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Tue May 5 00:46:52 UTC 2020


On 5/4/20 5:26 PM, Andrew Gierth wrote:
> I mean that where the tzcode uses "GMT" as a default zone name or
> abbreviation in the absence of data, FreeBSD uses "UTC" (and has since
> 2004).

It would be easy enough to replace the "GMT" in localtime.c and the "TZ=GMT0" in
date.c with their UTC counterparts. This issue is somewhat independent of what's
in 'backward', though, because this stuff is hard-coded in tzcode and tzdata's
contents don't affect it.

Getting back to the main point, I'm not sure it's worth deprecating links like
'US/Pacific' any time soon, as so many people use them and their cost is not
great. It might be worth coming up with some division of the existing 'backward'
file (e.g., recently-backward names vs older-backward names), although I'm not
sure what that would look like. I suppose we could have a comment associated
with each name saying when it became backward, though that'd increase
maintenance hassle.


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