On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 18:44, Joshua Rodman <[email protected]> wrote:
If what's really needed to be communicated is the actual offset, (so people
can do these calculations in their heads and get them wrong?) then just give
the damn number.
14:00-16:00 in Europe/Dublin, Europe/Edinburgh, Europe/Lisbon, Europe/London
time, GMT offset: +01:00
Or is it -01:00 during the summer? Heck if I know.
Depends on the convention.
Summer time in the British Isles is one hour later than UTC, so +01:00
would seem to be logical.
I think the POSIX TZ variable has those offsets the other way around,
though, so for example Central European Time (which is UTC+01:00 in
winter) is "CET-1CEST" with "-1" instead of "+1". (Possibly because
it's -1 hours west of GMT, as I read somewhere. This convention may
have arisen so that US time zones will have "normal" positive
numbers.)
So "+1" and "-1" are both justifiable historically - are you counting
"time relative to GMT" or "hours west of GMT"?
Hooray for software!
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <[email protected]>
