On 9/9/19 9:04 AM, Brian Inglis wrote:

Note that Etc/Zulu is already created as a Link from Etc/UTC, the names India and Quebec do not already exist in any directories, while America/Lima (Peru) already exists. Adding Etc/India, Etc/Lima, and Etc/Quebec would be confusing, as people would likely confuse these with the geographical names in other directories. And although we could replace these confusing names with inventions of our own (just as airports with a lot of Delta flights routinely replace "Delta" with "Data" or suchlike to avoid confusion when spelling out letters), using alternate names would make things even more confusing. Plus, the militaries of the world don't agree on the spellings of the words: for example, the US military commonly uses "Alpha" whereas the NATO standard is "Alfa". Also, there's the confusion from the fact that Internet RFC 822 got these zones backwards; RFC 822's successors washed their hands of the mess and say that military zone abbreviations should be ignored.

People who want fixed-hour time zones can use something like TZ="<-07>7", and there should be little practical need for more aliases. If we were to make changes in this area, I think I might prefer going the other way and removing Etc entirely, as everything in Etc is either confusing or redundant.