Robert Elz wrote: | | This is a kind of chicken/egg problem: because the tzdata files | | don't offer AEST and friends, people have to jump through hoops | | to use them; most don't bother. | | Back in 1993 there was almost no use of the tz database, that was still | comparatively early in its development (the 93b set of data is the oldest | one I have managed to save). Before then, people set the timezone name | in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways. I seem to have been using it forever, but I expect you're right. | | Certainly, if I could have one of these to use as an alternative | | to "Australia/Brisbane", that would be an acceptable compromise. | | When I saw ado's message, before seeing your reply, I was going to reply | and say that I didn't think that would work for you at all - that is, your | primary aim seemed to be to be able to sort incoming mail where the timezone | string was "EST" and you knew it was from somewhere in Eastern Aust, rather | than eastern north America. To achieve that you need to somehow get other | people to use a tz abbreviation that you like, You're quite right -- it doesn't get me what I really want, but I've largely given up on that now as I can see that it's not at all likely to fly any time soon (if ever). | creating tz db entries with | exotic names and different abbreviations is unlikely to achieve that, | people in Sydney are still going to pick Australia/Sydney 99 times out of | a hundred. True -- but if there's an alternative in the tz database that's "better" than "Australia/Sydney", I'd be able to point to it and suggest that people either use the alternative or, preferably, stop using the abbreviations altogether and just use the +1000 or +1100 that we can all understand. | For your own use there has never been a problem, you have always been able | to alter the TZ abbreviations that you use to anything that you would like | them to be. I knew that. I used to use "AEST/AEDT" on my own email, but dropped the abbreviations a few years ago in favour of unadorned numeric zones. And it's not my email that's causing me grief :-)