On 2021-05-22 14:10, Tom Lane via tz wrote:
Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> writes:
On 5/22/21 11:17 AM, Tim Parenti wrote:
In particular, the latter group (things like America/La_Paz -> Etc/GMT+4) seems to encourage things or behaviors which historically cause confusion, especially for novices:
We could avoid these problems by merging Etc/GMT+4 into America/La_Paz rather than vice versa. That would be easy to arrange, and would result in the same number of timezones. A downside would be that TZ='Etc/GMT+4' would no longer be equivalent to TZ='<-04>4' for pre-1970 timestamps, but those timestamps are out of scope anyway.
That seems really bad. If I ask for Etc/GMT+4, I should get a fixed GMT+4 offset for all time, not whatever the heck Bolivia's pre-1970 behavior was. Those zone names are not, or at least should not be, conditional on political decisions. IMO, Etc/GMT+4 is just an alternative way to spell the '<-04>4' notation ... one that could be very handy if dealing with software that knows the tzdb names but not POSIX notation.
+1 agreed - please *NEVER* merge fixed offset and political zones! They are not the same thing and a little duplication to avoid errors is good. I think I will also add local links with the expected offsets for Etc/UTC+-# to POSIX Etc/GMT-+#, to my current local links of phonetic and military zones. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised. [Data in binary units and prefixes, physical quantities in SI.]