Petr Machata <pmachata <at> redhat.com> writes:
Paul Eggert wrote:
I'd like to hear more from Australian correspondents on this before thinking about specific changes, though.
FYI, a request backing the use of AEST/AEDT has been opened in Red Hat bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=478566
Thanks, PM
Speaking as the person who opened this bug I'd like to make the following points: In the short time I have been in Australia (read: a little over 2 months) I have not heard of anyone refer to "Eastern Summer Time" it has always been a form of AXYT where X is a choice of W,C,E and y is either S and D. To me, the output of: [njones@njones ~]$ TZ="Australia/Brisbane" date Thu Jan 1 13:44:55 EST 2009 [njones@njones ~]$ TZ="Australia/Sydney" date Thu Jan 1 14:45:01 EST 2009 Is just confusing, I don't care about America using 'EST' as well (although that does become confusing at times) I just think it's bad. For instance, there is a town on the border of NSW and Queensland (NSW has DST, Queensland doesn't), apparently the state border runs through the middle of one of the streets, which would be confusing enough, but if your saying to someone (think output from a web script) "It'll be delievered by 5PM EST" it just doesn't make sense. I'll also point out a few examples for you: http://servicestatus.tpg.com.au/index.php?category=19&timeframe=future - Nation Wide ISP, states the outage time as "Outage Started: Wednesday 14 January 2009, 4:00 AM AEDST" - can't get confused, heck AEDST is really overkill, but at least I know what time they are talking about. Several major websites/TV stations use AEST/AEDT, i.e. Whirlpool, Nine Network, Seven Network, TEN Network (I think). I think the main reason you see so many "EST" results in Google is because it's a failed method for looking at this stuff, because it's possible you'll catch AEST, and your likely to catch linux users that refer to the output from 'date' in scripts/text/etc. As for the different states, most States don't specify what they want Time Zones to be called, so the Federal word (i.e. australia.gov.au) should be taken on this (with except of NSW). - Nigel