John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU> writes:
(1) I look at the Date: header and I want to know, without thinking too hard, where the originator is.
The Date headers only use ISO 8601 time zone offsets now, and prior to that, even when abbreviations were allowed, you were only permited to use the US time zone abbreviations (or the US military abbreviations, which have tons of other problems and were never in widespread use), never the Australian ones. Or are you referring to a comment in the header? (Your message didn't contain one in your Date header.)
(2) I can't remember if we are in daylight time or standard time so I type "date" and look at the abbreviation.
*heh*. I've done that too, although usually I just look at the time zone offset (via date -R). I think ctime output is ridiculous, so tend to avoid having to look at it.
The current Australian abbrevs do a poor job of both of those cases.
Given that they are worthless programatically, any argument that they are based on a dead API, or that programattic consistency is required, etc., etc. is not compelling. If they are worthless to software, let's make them useful to humans, please.
And this, I think, is the best argument for changing them, and I'm personally mildly inclined to agree, *provided* that it's the last time we ever change them. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>