[tz] Introduce Etc/UTC+x timezones?

Benjamin Drung benjamin.drung at canonical.com
Fri Apr 21 13:32:19 UTC 2023


Hi,

If people are aware of timezones, they often know UTC and their offsets
(e.g. Europe/Berlin is UTC+2 summer). But they are probably not aware
that the Etc/GMT offsets are inverted (e.g. you have to select Etc/GMT-2
for UTC+2). I was not aware of that and other people as well as the bugs
in Ubuntu and Debian indicate (see https://launchpad.net/bugs/1325949
and https://bugs.debian.org/540305).

What do you think about the idea of introducing Etc/UTC+x timezones that
have the "correct" offset so that people can select fixed offsets more
easily? So Etc/GMT-2 would be renamed to Etc/UTC+2 and Etc/GMT-2 would
become a symlink to it (same for all other Etc/GMT+x and Etc/GMT-x
timezones).

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer


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