Jesus M. Salvo Jr. wrote:
1) Why is it "EST" ? Shouldn't it be "EDT" or "AEDT" ?
tzdata uses the offical abbreviation for the timezone. There is no choice, the data is going to appear on legal documents under some applications. The offical abbreviation (or the abbreviation of the offical time zone name) is also a practical choice: it avoids some liabilities for the maintainers of the tzdata file.
Some legislation is stupid -- for example it will define a "X Standard Time" and a "X Summer Time". Presumably the legislators never thought that people might want to use an abbreviation, and there are usually no clauses disambiguating the abbreviations.
No Australian state legislation defines a AXST or AXDT, that's just a common abbreviation.
In Australia if you want to alter the abbreviation used
by tzdata you need to alter the law. You can do this
simply by asking your state to pass a regulation
("the abbreviation for summer time shall be XDT"). Most
government officials won't be up for this, they are always
afraid of knock-on consequences from this sort of action.Your best best is to wait for the regular review of legislation to reach the daylight savings laws and to send in a submission saying what a pain having XST/XST is. Daylight savings laws attract all sorts of nuts, so you might want to ask AUUG, ACS, AIIA to write supporting letters.
An alternative would be for CSIRO to make a regulation, as they have the delegation of the Commonwealth's time-keeping powers (all this state nonsense about differing daylight savings can be easily over-ridden by the Commonwealth's Weights and Measures Constitutional power). But having a Commonwealth regulation modify a state law is usually regarded as a poor idea (since then the state law and commonwealth regulation need to be maintained in lock-step).
Hope this helps explain the mess, glen
-- Glen Turner Tel: (08) 8303 3936 or +61 8 8303 3936 Australia's Academic & Research Network www.aarnet.edu.au -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
