In message <199611260904.KAA10440@uriah.heep.sax.de>, J Wunsch wrote:
You'll say ``Argh!'' now, i know.
After a long and heated discussion in the , we came to the conclusion that changing the timezone name for Central Europe from MET to CET is a very bad move.
Argh! :-) - According to my Langenscheidt Englisch-Deutsch Woerterbuch (a very popular German-English dictionary) MEZ is translated into English as CET and MESZ is translated into CEST. - Several other German-English dictionaries that I checked agree. - English geography textbooks call the area in which Germany and its neighbors are located "Central Europe" and almost never "Middle Europe". - The head of the PTB time department (German government timekeeping lab) confirmed to me that CET/CEST is the common usage. - CET clearly dominates MET by a factor >10 in the media. For example just have a look at European satellite TV schedules on videotext. Just do a Web search: When you see MET, then this is almost exclusively an output of the Unix "date" command, i.e. someone didn't care about the abbreviation at all when this was written. - I hardly ever have seen MET and METDST used anywhere outside the Unix world and we can very well assume that MET is today only known because it somehow found its way into the Olson database some time ago. DST is an abbreviation exclusively used in the U.S., most other countries say "summer time". Please forward this list of arguments to the other members of the FreeBSD core team to allow them to benefit from the research that others and I have done on this subject before the tz databse was changed and to allow interested people to base future "long and heated discussions" on some more real world evidence and not just on what Unix geeks are used to know about the real world.
The reasoning: the name MET is in widespread use here on almost all Unix systems around.
Just because the tz database is in widespread use on almost all Unix systems around. As you can read in any statistics textbook: Before you draw conclusions form correlations, you must eliminate common causes.
(With AIX being the most noteworthy and most funny exception; they call it ``Norway-France-Time'', NFT. :)
Oops ... well, what else would you ecpect from AIX ... ;-)
technically correct your choice for CET might be, it breaks tradition, and is in general something people here will consider a ``US-centric'' decision.
The main arguments for the MET->CET came from people in France and Germany. Calling the discussion for the MET->CET change "US-centric" certainly lacks any basis. Markus (German) -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Science grad student, Purdue University, Indiana, USA -- email: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu