Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:18:48 -0400 From: Tim Parenti <tim@timtimeonline.com> Message-ID: <CAFpi07wtWH_Sjh06QZ=X=Yp7qoto6Z+0zRQEnXh5Se_R5SZdvA@mail.gmail.com> | Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe most robust implementations of the TZ | database already have some way of expressing an offset in this way. That isn't the issue. What is of interest for this topic, is what the tz database (and code) should put in the tzname[] array &/or tm_zone field of the struct tm. Confusing that with what anyone would ever use to select a timezone, or identify one, or anything else useful at all, just muddies the waters. Personally, I'd have no great problem with putting some numeric zone indicator in place of the abbreviation, but apparently that might confuse some code that parses the output from the date command (and perhaps a few other similar things) and which expect that the abbreviation will be all alphabetic. Opting for caution when changing things is what this project has always done, and I see no reason to alter that policy, so I would not break anyone's code by altering the policy that the zone abbreviation (tzname[] or tm_zone) is a short alphabetic string (even an upper case short alphabetic string.) So, using -04:00 just isn't an option, sorry. LST, or LT, or almost anything else like that is possible - there's no need for it not to be ambiguous, or to be useful, that's already a lost cause, just for it to be syntactically consistent with current expectations. kre