Bug#149902: Australian time zones
At Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:26:29 +0100,
Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> Wow, this is a bug come back from the dead. I read the summary in glibc
> and think it's wierd. For example, the counts supposedly showing
> "Eastern Standard Time" to be more popular than "Australia Eastern
> Standard Time" are bogus. The first search is obviously going to
> include the results of the second. A simple calculation shows that even
> then the prefix was four times as common as without.
>
> Current figures from Google:
> "Australian Eastern Standard Time" site:.au 155000
> "Eastern Standard Time" site:.au 206000
> "Eastern Standard Time" -"Australian Eastern Standard Time" site:.au 50000
This information is probably useful to change upstream timezone
maintainer's mind. Do you have actual information of the goverment
statements? If Australian goverment decided to encourage using AEST
instead of EST, it's also useful. If you have one, we should transfer
your information to upstream.
> But in my mind the argument is simple: EST is ambiguous, AEST is not.
> The issue I had has to do with input, not output. Saying "9:00 EST"
> is ambiguous, but "9:00 AEST" is not even recognised as a valid date.
> Obviously you can't remove all ambiguity, but it's certainly worth
> removing whenever possible.
>
> There is still no way to specify an Australian timezone to date, which
> I suppose is the real bug. Yes, you can affect it with environment
> variables, but still...
>
> $ date --date='9:00 Australia/Sydney'
> date: invalid date `9:00 Australia/Sydney'
> $ date --date='9:00 EST'
> Tue Dec 20 15:00:00 CET 2005 <--- ??? Not european time. What is it?
> $ date --date='9:00 AEST'
> date: invalid date `9:00 AEST'
Actually upstream author also considered this ambiguity, and they
finally decided short abbreviated timezone could be conflicted each
other - for example they explained "IST" in their arguments (did you
see australasia file?).
-- gotom
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