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Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:47:13 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: owl-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: timezones
On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 08:58:32PM +0400, croco@...nwall.com wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 08:21:03PM +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
> > What we may do for our older glibc is take the Etc/GMT-4 file, change
> > the name inside it from GMT-4 to MSD, and replace the Europe/Moscow file
>
> I don't think it is good to change the name. MSD means 'Moscow
> Daylight-saving', and everyone knows this particular meaning, so this can
> confuse people.
Isn't Moscow going to stay at precisely this same timezone, with
permanent daylight savings now?
> What name to use, then -- is another problem.
We'll need to use what the majority is going to use - let's find this
out (e.g., see what upstream glibc does).
> > if(ents.HasPrefix("GMT+") ||
> > ents.HasPrefix("GMT-") ||
> >
> > This is because these timezones are historically confusingly named - the
> > opposite from what one would expect (the timezone file Etc/GMT-4 is
> > actually for four hours ahead of GMT).
>
> Surprisingly enough, this is still the case in the distros I've got handy
> (besides Owl, these are Ubuntu and Debian), AND they do precisely the same
> things for UTC+n/UTC-n. Isn't it may be the time to break this weird
> tradition, heh? Or may be invent some new names, e.g. GMTZ+/GMTZ-?
Maybe. Again, I'd like to know how other distros approach the problem
of allowing arbitrary GMT or UTC offset timezones to be configured,
preferably without the confusing timezone names being displayed anywhere.
> We can add another menu item, such as 'specify the time zone offset
> manually'.
Sure. The primary question (to which I have no answer yet) is how the
setup program should configure the system for that. Using the existing
confusingly named timezones doesn't sound good to me.
Alexander
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