This is a bit of a minor thing but irritates me no end.
I'm not quite sure who has chosen the three letter abbreviations
for timezones... I like the long zone names like ``Australia/Sydney''
these are very good. However, the three letter abbreviations
are completely stupid, especially when Sydney gets EST which is
also used by Melbourne and a bunch of places in the USA.
The upshot of this is:
[telford@ftoomsh zoneinfo]$ date
Fri Feb 25 15:43:29 EST 2000
[telford@ftoomsh zoneinfo]$ date --date="`date`"
Sat Feb 26 07:43:24 EST 2000
Which means that the system doesn't even recognise it's own date
correctly -- all because of the ambiguous EST abbreviation.
It also means that when you have a date with an EST abbreviation
inside it then you have no idea what it means unless you can get
other context information to go with it.
The other stupid thing is that EST stands for both Eastern Standard
Time (which implies no daylight saving) and Eastern Summer Time
(which implies always daylight saving) so unless you want to write
it out full length you don't know the daylight saving status of the
time.
I'm all for outlawing three letter abbreviations completely
(all other than GMT anyhow) but if they have to be used then could
Sydney please get a unique three letter abbreviation? I suggest SYD
because no one else is using that but anything other than EST would
be good.
Another suggestion is to get the date utility to check the local three
letter name and assume that any ambiguity resolves in favour of the
local time. This is a sad thing to have to do and not the correct
solution but at least it fixes the problem shown above.
- Tel
PS: If you gnu people just get the zone data off someone else then
please just forward this on to whoever keeps the zone data or else
give me that person's email.
