Bug#93810: Australian zoneinfo wrong - should be AEST, not EST
Hi,
> I'm in Melbourne, Australia, so, naturally, I use the Australia/Melbourne
> timezone; logical, right?
> But obviously not to libc6:
>
> daniel@piro:~$ date
> Fri Apr 13 16:20:10 EST 2001
>
> This should be AEST, seeing as that's the official timezone name (Australian
> Eastern Standard Time).
>
> This has caused much confusion on IRC; even worse than normal! Stop the
> madness!
glibc 2.3.1 timezone/australasia has a folloing note:
# From Paul Eggert (2001-04-05), summarizing a long discussion about "EST"
# versus "AEST" etc.:
#
# I see the following points of dispute:
#
# * How important are unique time zone abbreviations?
#
# Here I tend to agree with the point (most recently made by Chris
# Newman) that unique abbreviations should not be essential for proper
# operation of software. We have other instances of ambiguity
# (e.g. "IST" denoting both "Israel Standard Time" and "Indian
# Standard Time"), and they are not likely to go away any time soon.
# In the old days, some software mistakenly relied on unique
# abbreviations, but this is becoming less true with time, and I don't
# think it's that important to cater to such software these days.
#
# On the other hand, there is another motivation for unambiguous
# abbreviations: it cuts down on human confusion. This is
# particularly true for Australia, where "EST" can mean one thing for
# time T and a different thing for time T plus 1 second.
#
# * Does the relevant legislation indicate which abbreviations should be used?
#
# Here I tend to think that things are a mess, just as they are in
# many other countries. We Americans are currently disagreeing about
# which abbreviation to use for the newly legislated Chamorro Standard
# Time, for example.
#
# Personally, I would prefer to use common practice; I would like to
# refer to legislation only for examples of common practice, or as a
# tiebreaker.
#
# * Do Australians more often use "Eastern Daylight Time" or "Eastern
# Summer Time"? Do they typically prefix the time zone names with
# the word "Australian"?
#
# My own impression is that both "Daylight Time" and "Summer Time" are
# common and are widely understood, but that "Summer Time" is more
# popular; and that the leading "A" is also common but is omitted more
# often than not. I just used AltaVista advanced search and got the
# following count of page hits:
#
# 1,103 "Eastern Summer Time" AND domain:au
# 971 "Australian Eastern Summer Time" AND domain:au
# 613 "Eastern Daylight Time" AND domain:au
# 127 "Australian Eastern Daylight Time" AND domain:au
#
# Here "Summer" seems quite a bit more popular than "Daylight",
# particularly when we know the time zone is Australian and not US,
# say. The "Australian" prefix seems to be popular for Eastern Summer
# Time, but unpopular for Eastern Daylight Time.
#
# For abbreviations, tools like AltaVista are less useful because of
# ambiguity. Many hits are not really time zones, unfortunately, and
# many hits denote US time zones and not Australian ones. But here
# are the hit counts anyway:
#
# 161,304 "EST" and domain:au
# 25,156 "EDT" and domain:au
# 18,263 "AEST" and domain:au
# 10,416 "AEDT" and domain:au
#
# 14,538 "CST" and domain:au
# 5,728 "CDT" and domain:au
# 176 "ACST" and domain:au
# 29 "ACDT" and domain:au
#
# 7,539 "WST" and domain:au
# 68 "AWST" and domain:au
#
# This data suggest that Australians tend to omit the "A" prefix in
# practice. The situation for "ST" versus "DT" is less clear, given
# the ambiguities involved.
#
# * How do Australians feel about the abbreviations in the tz database?
#
# If you just count Australians on this list, I count 2 in favor and 3
# against. One of the "against" votes (David Keegel) counseled delay,
# saying that both AEST/AEDT and EST/EST are widely used and
# understood in Australia.
So the result of their long discussions, it does not become "AEST".
AEST is not common even in Australia from their search result. So I
can't accept your bug report because upstream and the majority of
Australian do not use AEST. I shall close this bug unless you have
strong reason to keep opening.
Regards,
-- gotom
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