[tz] Introduce Etc/UTC+x timezones?

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Fri, 21 Apr 2023 15:32:19 +0200
    From:        Benjamin Drung via tz <tz at iana.org>
    Message-ID:  <e56611ce5f328ac88ca0b902ac77c8fa10d3a3b7.camel at canonical.com>

  | So Etc/GMT-2 would be renamed to Etc/UTC+2 and Etc/GMT-2 would
  | become a symlink to it

GMT+2 and GMT-2 already both exist, they just (for historical reasons)
mean the opposite of the current standard way of writing time offsets.

$ TZ=Etc/GMT+2 date; date -u; TZ=Etc/GMT-2 date
Fri Apr 21 14:47:33 -02 2023
Fri Apr 21 16:47:33 UTC 2023
Fri Apr 21 18:47:33 +02 2023

It is the same with POSIX standard TZ settings (as defined now)

	TZ=UTC-2 is in Europe, TZ=UTC+2 is somewhere in the Atlantic.

Nothing can really be done about this -- though I guess we could have
a whole new set of timezones, like Etc but with the signs reversed.
like
	TZ=Std/GMT+2   TZ=Std/UTC-4

or something -- perhaps ISO instead of Std as ISO8601 (or whatever number it
is) uses the opposite sign for the offset from UTC than POSIX does.

Whether that would make things more, or less, confusing, I have no idea.

kre