Re: date is not consistent

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

retitle 95254 strftime("%Z") uses ambiguous timezone names
affects 95254 + date
# tzdata is its own package nowadays
reassign 95254 tzdata
forcemerge 93810 95254
quit

Hi,

Anand Kumria wrote:

> anand@caliban:~$ date -u -d "`date`"
> Thu Apr 26 10:48:24 UTC 2001
>
> anand@caliban:~$ date -u -d "`date -u`"
> Wed Apr 25 19:48:26 UTC 2001
>
> I believe part of the problem is that EST may be matching multiple
> areas.

Thanks for a clear report.  Hopefully others stumbling on this
report can use it to quickly get a sense of the current state of
things.

>From tzdata2001d:

	#                           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.

There are other reasons to switch to calling it AEST that may or may
not be compelling, as discussed from time to time upstream.  The
latest is http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/3244/focus=3251
from 2010-06-15.

Regards,
Jonathan