[tz] Introduce Etc/UTC+x timezones?

[Russ Allbery]

Benjamin Drung via tz <tz at iana.org> writes:

> Help on wording will be highly appreciated. Currently debconf will ask
> "Please select the city or region corresponding to your time zone. Time
> zone: GMT, GMT+0, GMT+1, ..., GMT-9, Greenwich, UCT, UTC, Universal,
> Zulu".

> Draft: "Please select the offset corresponding to your time zone.
> Contrary to UTC, positive values to GMT refer to zones west to Greenwich
> and negative values to east to Greenwich (e.g. UTC-6 = GMT+6). Time
> zone: GMT, GMT+0, GMT+1, ..., GMT-9, Greenwich, UCT, UTC, Universal,
> Zulu".

Personally, I would hide all of the GMT language completely in the prompt
and instead offer as choices UTC-1, UTC-2, UTC-3, etc., and then convert
them under the hood to the GMT+1, etc., zones if one of those were chosen.

Due to RFC 822 and other subsequent standardization, I think the majority
of people (among those who would consider configuring an offset time zone
instead of a geographic one) are going to be familiar with the sign
convention that matches that used in RFC 822 and are not going to expect
the opposite sign convention.  Rather than trying to explain it in text
that people may not read, I would just hide it.

Similarly, I wouldn't expose labels like Greenwich, UCT, Universal, Zulu,
etc.  I don't think that stuff is useful in a UI for zone picking.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>