On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 09:47:56AM +0900, GOTO Masanori wrote: > Note that you probably want to know why AEST vs EST is long-standing > problem: the short summary is available in glibc source tree > timezone/australasia. Not only one governmental page but also showing > another information source would be nice idea to change time zone > maintainers.
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 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' Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a > tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone > else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.
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