As Janis.Papanagnou@PC-Plus.DE wrote:
Markus wrote:
Consequently: Only humans have to recognize the time zone abbreviation and it definitely does not make sense here to use one that does not follow common practice (Langenscheid, PTB, SkyTV, CNN, etc.).
That's the point, humans should be provided a user-friendly naming scheme. But I cannot second your conclusions. The US time zone "names" are very strange (to me!), but I don't care - it's not my domain, I have not to use them. CNN, etc. is not what I would call common practice; in DE I hear the terms MEZ (or MET). I am not talking with the PTB, nor do I inform myself by US broadcasts.
Hah! You thought i already gave up? No, only deferred... About a month ago, i started a small vote in de.comp.os.unix, that is the projected target people that will be most affected by your decision. (Btw., Markus later sent a followup letter there, and got one very interesting (from my point of view :) followup today, so people understanding German might want to read it there.) Anyway, the question i've asked the people was basically: ``Do you prefer the technically more correct term CET, the historically used MET, or don't you care?'' Note that i _did not_ intend to go into any technical debate about this, as i've indicated previously that i might agree that CET is technically more correct, but this is IMHO not the only point to consider. (Today's followup article even questions the technical correctness.) So here is the result: j@uriah 514% foreach file ( /home/vote/[A-Z]* ) foreach? printf "%10s: " `basename $file`; cat $file; tr -d ' ' < $file | wc -c foreach? end CET: X X XXx X XX 8 Egal: X X X x 4 MET: x XXXxXXX XX X XxX x XXX Xx 20 This basically indicates that your timezone name change is mostly unwelcome among those people who finally have to live with it. Go figure. (The vote ran for a period of 8 or 10 days. Given the usual traffic in de.comp.os.unix, 32 participiants aren't too bad. Needless to say, i didn't vote myself.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)