[H-GEN] Brisbane's timezone

[Ted Percival]

Greg Black wrote:
> On 2008-04-03, Jason McDonald wrote:
>> /me votes for AEST.
> 
> The second reason why this vote serves no useful purpose is that -- as I
> explained in a previous reply -- this is not an election.  If you want
> this change, you have to persuade the TZ people (and I can tell you for
> free that you have no chance of doing that).

It was a quick way to get a few more opinions on what people prefer to 
call their timezone. From the responses I've got both on this thread and 
from asking people in person, I see a preference for AEST.

Regardless of whether the tz list agrees that this is worth changing, I 
have changed it on my systems and have made those changes available to 
others by providing a source patch and patched packages at 
http://tedp.id.au/tzdata-au/

> The most compelling reason why that serves no useful purpose is that it
> doesn't mean anything remotely useful -- people use it to mean both
> Australian Eastern Summer Time and Australian Eastern Standard Time, and
> by "people" I mean both government agencies and computer systems admins.

The existing tzdata calls them both EST. I have a preference for AEDT as 
the daylight saving (summer time) variant because it's distinguishable. 
It's also what I've always seen "in the wild". Making a distinction 
between AEST and AEDT is part of the patch.

I fully accept that timezone abbreviations might not be unique and can't 
be mapped back onto a UTC offset with any kind of reliability. The fact 
is that they *do* show up in many places, and to that extent I'd like 
them to be correct. While we can argue about what's correct, I've chosen 
to fix my systems *now* without being held to the status quo just 
because it's the way it's always been.

Thank you to everyone who responded. I intend to let this thread go back 
to sleep now.