On Oct 27, 2007, at 10:22 AM, Russell L. Harris wrote:
* Jonas Meurer <jonas@freesources.org> [071027 09:14]:i remember some debconf question at the installation of debian, where i was asked whether my hardware clock is set to GMT. is GMT the same as UTC?and to which package does this question belong?Check by searching with Google, but I think that there is only a minor technical difference between GMT and UTC. For practical purposes, they are one and the same. GMT is the traditional term; UTC is recent.
UTC is the acronym for "Coordinated Universal Time" (It's French. International standards are often officially designated in French.) It's also used as the timezone designation (when one is called for) of international standard time independent of Timezone or Daylight Savings time fiddles.
GMT is the acronym for "Greenwich Mean Time". It's the timezone designation used in England equivalent to Standard Time in London. The equivalent designation for Daylight Savings time is BST, which stands for British Summer Time.
It happens that the offset between UTC and GMT is 0 hours, 0 minutes. And historically, GMT existed long before UTC was invented. So people often use "GMT" when they really mean "UTC".
If the installer really asked if the hardware clock was set to GMT, it's a bug. It should be changed to refer to "UTC" instead.
Rick