Mark Davis said:
Ideally we need 6 names, starting with 3 full ones:
generic: British Time
Unless you want to be targeted by many Northern Irish, I wouldn't do that. There is no generic name for the time used in the UK.
winter: ?
Greenwich Mean Time
summer: British Summer Time
Thus we can't use the long name Greenwich Mean Time or the abbreviation GMT to refer to the "British Winter Time",
You can't *NOT* use the long name Greenwich Mean Time or the abbreviation GMT to refer to it. Because that is what it is called. Full stop. Selah. End of story. Are you also going to declare that New York can't use EST? If so, then you are away with the fairies.
We also need three distinct abbreviations (if available).
generic: BT
GMT/BST
winter: ?
GMT
summer: BST?
BST
If an abbreviation is not specified, the fallback will be the corresponding long name. If a long name is not specified, the fallback is to a country name (if a single zone)
Will you get this right?
Another twist. The timezone files that are generated are for the default language values, in this case, English. The values can actually vary by individual country. So we have to decide whether these changes should be made for all of English, or for just, say, the UK and Ireland (en_GB, en_IE).
I don't know if Ireland uses the term GMT and BST, or something else. Probably the latter.
I don't see any reason for not doing it for all of English ("Summer Time" is a more meaningful term than "Daylight Savings Time" anyway), but if there are any reasons not to do that you might mention them.
How about the fact that many English-speaking people [*] use the term "Daylight Savings Time"? [*] Accepting American as a dialect of English for this purpose. -- Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <clive@demon.net> | Tel: +44 20 8495 6138 Internet Expert | Home: <clive@davros.org> | Fax: +44 870 051 9937 Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646 Thus plc | |