Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 09:09:12 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Greg Black <gjb@comkey.com.au> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Timezone question Message-ID: <19990406090912.V2142@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <19990405005423.480.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au>; from Greg Black on Mon, Apr 05, 1999 at 10:54:22AM %2B1000 References: <19990404044642.A60884@sr.se> <19990404132026.T2142@lemis.com> <19990405005423.480.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au>
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On Monday, 5 April 1999 at 10:54:22 +1000, Greg Black wrote: >> $ date >> Sun Apr 4 13:09:34 CST 1999 >> $ TZ=Europe/Stockholm date >> Sun Apr 4 05:39:43 CEST 1999 >> $ TZ=America/Chicago date >> Sat Apr 3 21:39:54 CST 1999 >> $ >> >> Note the imaginative time zone abbreviations, some of which I think >> are just plain wrong. > > It could be argued that date(1) is wrong to display those > alphabetic timezones and that it ought to change over to the > same numeric form that is now almost universally used in email > date headers: > > $ gbdate > Mon, 05 Apr 1999 10:47:12 +1000 > $ TZ=Europe/Stockholm gbdate > Mon, 05 Apr 1999 02:47:14 +0200 > $ TZ=America/Chicago gbdate > Sun, 04 Apr 1999 19:47:24 -0500 It could be argued. Notice that the sign here is the inverse of what System V does in its time zones (we're -9.5, the (continental) USA is between +4 and +7). > This tells readers, both human and automated, exactly which > timezone we're talking about Well, no, it tells the offset of the time zone from UTC, no more. It doesn't say, for example, that I'm in South Australia, which has DST, and not in NT, which doesn't. > and avoids all the ambiguity of the alphabetic timezone names which > seem to get chosen by local authorities (or pseudo-authorities) > without reference to the rest of the world. Why should local authorities refer to the rest of the world about purely local matters? My reference above was to the fact that the abbreviations used by our software often have little to do with the official abbreviations. It would probably be good to output both time zone name and current offset: $ TZ=Europe/Lisbon date Tue Apr 6 00:38:00 WEST 1999 (+0100) $ TZ=Europe/London date Tue Apr 6 00:38:04 BST 1999 (+0100) Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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