On Thu, 5 Dec 2013, Alfie John wrote:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013, at 09:40 AM, Zefram wrote:
Alfie John wrote:
I guess it's a tautology seeing as that's what's defined in the etcetera
file, but was I wrong in assuming that UTC+11 meant Etc/GMT+11?

Yes.  Etc/GMT+11 is UT-11h, and Etc/GMT-11 is UT+11h.  You can also see
this by looking in the Olson etcetera file:

# Zone  NAME            GMTOFF  RULES   FORMAT  [UNTIL]
Zone    Etc/GMT-11      11      -       GMT-11
Zone    Etc/GMT+11      -11     -       GMT+11

Such zic input, specifically the GMTOFF column, uses the usual sign
convention; you can see here that the zone names use the opposite
convention.

Cool, thanks for the clarification.

I'd hate to think of how much software out there assumes the same as I
did.

Does any sane software actually use these ancient time zone names?

The only useful thing to do is use a zone like America/Chicago so you get DST transitions and such. If you want a DST-less zone that's simple to understand, you should use UTC, not some fixed offset from UTC (which will very confusingsly match up with different local time zones as DST comes and goes in various places).


-dave

/*============================================================
http://VegGuide.org               http://blog.urth.org
Your guide to all that's veg      House Absolute(ly Pointless)
============================================================*/

Reply via email to