Hi Folks,
I am using a Java platform (hosted on Linux and on Windows) in which I find some expected timezones to be missing. I write to enquire whether they are defined at IANA and, if not, whether they can be added.
The timezones in question are as follows:
Africa/Praia (capital city of Cabo Verde, also known also as Cape Verde) = UTC-1
CVT (Cabo Verde Time) = UTC-1 (one hour West of Greenwich)
WAT (West Africa Time) = UTC+1 (one hour East of Greenwich)
CAT (Central Africa Time) = UTC+2 (two hours East of Greenwich)
EAT (East Africa Time) = UTC+3 (three hours East of Greenwich)
My source for this information is: https://www.worldtimezone.com/time-africa24.php
Many thanks, Robin.
[I am cc'ing this to the tz mailing list (and changing the subject line)
to give tz readers a heads-up about the terminology issue. The question
here is: should tzdb man pages say "time zone" or "timezone"?
For context please see Michael Kerrisk's email
<https://marc.info/?m=152964652828320>, which says:
> When I inherited the project, the pages used a mixture of "time zone"
> and "timezone", with the former predominant. I nevertheless
> standardized on the latter, and although I don't recall for sure, I
> suspect it was because that is the spelling used in POSIX. (As an
> aside, there's an argument that--because POSIX--tzdb might want to
> consider switching spellings.) I'm not religious about the particular
> choice (although I have naturally now got used to the particular
> choice I made some years ago), but I did make that choice because I
> want consistency within the project, and I'm reluctant to introduce
> inconsistency.
and my response <https://marc.info/?m=152964676331902>, which says:
> I deferred to POSIX for "timestamp" versus "time stamp", but
> "timezone" is a bridge too far for me.
]
On second thought, perhaps I was too hasty. We could distinguish "time
zone" in the usual English-language sense (a set of geographic locations
that currently share the same standard time offset from UTC) from
"timezone" in the POSIX sense (a history and predicted future of UTC
offsets, abbreviations and isdst flags). If so, the tzdb documentation
could be more careful about using "time zone" for the former and
"timezone" for the latter, and this would make for fewer changes to the
GNU/Linux man-pages for tzdb. I can look into this and propose an
updated set of tzdb-related patches accordingly.
If I were designing the terminology from scratch, I wouldn't specify two
nearly-identical phrases "time zone" and "timezone" to mean such
different things. However, the phrases do have the advantage of existing
practice (common English usage and POSIX, respectively).