Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2023 15:32:19 +0200 From: Benjamin Drung via tz <tz@iana.org> Message-ID: <e56611ce5f328ac88ca0b902ac77c8fa10d3a3b7.camel@canonical.com> | So Etc/GMT-2 would be renamed to Etc/UTC+2 and Etc/GMT-2 would | become a symlink to it GMT+2 and GMT-2 already both exist, they just (for historical reasons) mean the opposite of the current standard way of writing time offsets. $ TZ=Etc/GMT+2 date; date -u; TZ=Etc/GMT-2 date Fri Apr 21 14:47:33 -02 2023 Fri Apr 21 16:47:33 UTC 2023 Fri Apr 21 18:47:33 +02 2023 It is the same with POSIX standard TZ settings (as defined now) TZ=UTC-2 is in Europe, TZ=UTC+2 is somewhere in the Atlantic. Nothing can really be done about this -- though I guess we could have a whole new set of timezones, like Etc but with the signs reversed. like TZ=Std/GMT+2 TZ=Std/UTC-4 or something -- perhaps ISO instead of Std as ISO8601 (or whatever number it is) uses the opposite sign for the offset from UTC than POSIX does. Whether that would make things more, or less, confusing, I have no idea. kre