Hi Paul! I know Avi Alkalay, AFAIK he still works in IBM Brazil (I did). Let´s wait for his answer. I agree with you - the english term more similar to ours ("Horario de Verao") is Summer Time. But DST (Daylight Saving Time) seems to be the most popular around the globe. We learned that applications such as MySQL are affected by using non-GLIBC-compliant abbreviations. Are you aware of something like that? I hope we together solve this confusion. As I stated in my last message, there should be a FAQ entry. The only clear explanation is on "glibc-x.x.x/timezone/southamerica", too hidden :-) Regards, -- Ronaldo C Vasconcellos CAIS/RNP Security Incidents Response Center Brazilian Research and Academic Network http://www.rnp.br/en/cais On Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Paul Eggert wrote:
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 09:48:29 -0700 From: Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU> To: Ronaldo Vasconcellos <ronaldo@cais.rnp.br> Cc: The GNU C Library Steering Committee <glibc-sc@gnu.org>, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com>, tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov, avi@unix.sh Subject: Re: Daylight Saving Time in Brazil
As far as I can see, the abbreviations used in the above-referenced table are merely examples and are not meant to be recommendations. Abbreviations like "BRDT" would not correspond to common Brazilian practice, which is to use the Portuguese equivalent of "summer time" rather than "daylight time".
As is stated in the tz tables' comments, in 1999 I invented the abbreviations BRT/BRST, AMT/AMST, etc., that are used in the current tz tables for Brazil. As far as I know nobody else has needed, or uses, English-language acronyms for the Brazilian time zone. However, should an alternate tradition arise in practice, of course we'd prefer to use the English-language abbreviations that people are actually using, as opposed to abbreviations that we have invented.