I believe both Timothy and I prefer prefer AEST over EST, but it is a different issue than the Daylight saving time ambiguity issue, so we agreed that we we should probably make only the minimal changes that resolved the Daylight ambiguity issue with the least changes, since it was more likely to be a proposal that would be accepted into tz. We changed only the daylight time abbreviations to end the ambiguity. But if the tz maintainers believe that using AEST instead of EST would at the same time help resolve historical ambiguities caused by older versions of the tz database, I am sure we could re-roll the proposal to better suite the preferences of the maintainers. Until then, what our little sub-committee has proposed will likely stand as is. On 2013-04-12 7:16, Ian Abbott wrote:
On 2013-04-11 17:53, Dennis Ferguson wrote:
I would note, however, that the proposed patch doesn't just limit itself to reducing the ambiguity of future timestamps not yet recorded, it also changes the database information about the abbreviations used for historical timestamps produced by the TZ database. While the issue of what time zone abbreviations people in Australia might have preferred to use is for others to debate there can be no dispute about the abbreviations the TZ database has used for the last 20 years, nor is there any way to change that, but by altering that data one is effectively removing the information about the history of the database itself that one would need to know to interpret timestamps already recorded with the "unwitting use" of the TZ database.
That's all the more reason to add the 'A' prefix to the new abbreviations, I think, just so it's easier to tell if an old date string is using the old abbreviation or the new one.
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