[tz] Introduce Etc/UTC+x timezones?

[Benjamin Drung]

On Tue, 2023-05-02 at 13:13 -0400, Tim Parenti wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2 May 2023 at 11:19, Benjamin Drung
> <benjamin.drung at canonical.com> wrote:
> > 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".
> > 
> 
> 
> It would be more accurate to say something more along the lines of:
> 
> "Contrary to modern conventions, POSIX-compatible zones use positive
> values to refer to zones west of Greenwich and negative values for
> those east of Greenwich (e.g., 'Etc/GMT+6' refers to 6 hours west of
> Greenwich, commonly called 'UTC-6')."

Thanks. I will use this explanation in the debconf prompt.

Thanks for all feedback in this thread. Some responses demonstrated that
I failed to describe the context. On Debian/Ubuntu systems users
normally select their timezones with a location picker. The tzdata
package comes with debconf questions to set the timezone. You can see
them by running "dpkg-reconfigure tzdata". It will first ask for the
area (like Europe, America, Etc). Then it will ask for the country.

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer