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From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de>
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Subject: Re: Can anyone explain...?
In-Reply-To: <9611231832.AA04161@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> from Garrett Wollman at "Nov 23, 96 01:32:44 pm"
To: wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 09:58:37 +0100 (MET)
Cc: FreeBSD-current@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD current users)
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Garrett Wollman writes:
> <<On Sat, 23 Nov 1996 03:07:39 GMT, Adam David <adam@veda.is> said:
>
>>> I vote for keeping the previous name.
>
>> It would be worth keeping MET for backward compatibility?
>> CET does make better sense though as the standard name.
>
> That doesn't make any sense.  A timezone only has a single set of
> abbreviations.

Of course it makes sense.  How many time zones are there?  With the
exception of India and South Australia, all are modulo one hour off
from UTC.  That makes about 26 or so.  And how many are there really?
For that matter, take GMT and UTC.  What are the time zone
abbreviations for Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, all of
which are UTC+8 and don't have summer time?

> Unless you wanted to create an alternative set of
> timezone data files, the only difference in which was that some
> European countries have a different abbreviation?  Gack.

That's the way it is in the Real World.  Sorry, but you're not the one
to change it.

> So long as I'm maintaining the timezone database I want to minimize
> our divergence from the master source,

But you're changing it from what every other system does.  Sorry, I
believe this is just plain *wrong*.

> and I am strongly opposed to changes such as you suggest which would
> represent a nightmare in thirty different zones.  I have in my
> mailbox right now a 2500-line patch from Paul Eggert implementing
> changes on every single continent (including Antarctica!); I won't
> want this to become more of a hassle.

Have you thought of coordinating this with other "vendors"?
Gratuitous changes in things which don't really have anything to do
with the operating system aren't going to make FreeBSD any more
popular.

Greg