-----Original Message----- From: Chris Bitmead [SMTP:chris.bitmead@bigfoot.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 1999 4:30 AM To: 'tz' Cc: Robert Elz Subject: Re: FW: Australian Timezone issues. Robert Elz wrote:
| Has any thought been given to having the Australian EST timezone renamed | to AEST?
No. Or at least, I certainly hope it has not.
why?
| For example, when a database dumps a time 'Sun May 9 11:07:06 | EST 1999 in Australia, and then the database reads the time back in, it | assumes that EST is New York time and everything gets screwed up.
Any code that does that is simply broken. Time zone names are a hint to humans. They simply aren't unambiguous. The two Aust zone abbreviations that are the same as their US equivalents (EST and CST) aren't the only ambiguous ones around (and then there are all the places that have no real concept of a timezone name at all - and the tz database just invents one for them - most of the countries in South East Asia are given "ICT", which seems to be "Indo China Time" which, as a label, means nothing locally at all).
Well I'll report that to the database developers. If that is the official way it is, and it's not just Australia in this boat, then I guess things have to change in how people write code. This is a quote from the POSTGRESQL database documentation... "If the compiler option USE_AUSTRALIAN_RULES is set then EST refers to Australia Eastern Std Time, which has an offset of +10:00 hours from UTC. Australian time zones and their naming variants account for fully one quarter of all time zones in the Postgres time zone lookup table."
| reports when TZ=EST.
You give ambiguous input, you can expect to get ambiguous ouput. If you want to specify Australian time, use TZ=Australia/Sydney or whatever, and for North American, use TZ=America/New_York.
But there doesn't seem to be a portable way to find out the string "Australia/Sydney" on your computer. Everything would be fine and dandy if strftime() returned the zone as "Australia/Sydney", but that's not what it does, it returns the mnumonic EST buried inside the zone file. If the mnumonic was "Australia/Sydney" then fine, but it's not.
You need to be more precise than just "eastern" anyway to represent historical times accurately.
Well, current times would be a start.
Alternatively, convince the whole world that time zone names ought always have a country, or region prefix - perhaps we could have "American Eastern Standard Time" (not US, as it applies in Canada, and perhaps parts of Mexico and other parts of Central America as well) and Australian Eastern Standard Time, and both could be AEST
Do we have to convince the world, or merely UNIX operating system vendors? After all, as you say zone names are ambiguous now, so nobody can be relying on them for other than (potentially inaccurate) information. So making them unique could only improve things no?
Time zone names are just an inherantly local phenomenon - anything, anywhere, which intends to write, and then parse, a date string needs to be sure that the string contains the numeric zone offset.
Even humans which don't carry time offsets and summer time rules around in their heads?