🚀 go-pugleaf

Vic Abell:
>Special thanks goes to Stephen J. Walick <steve@nshore.ncoast.org>
>who pointed out the list of time zones in .../libc/dateok.c of Henry
>Spencer's C News sources.

[Make that Geoff Collyer's and Henry Spencer's C News sources.  In this
case, the code comes from me, Mark Moraes and Rich Wales via Rayan
Zachariassen.]

The currently-available C News time zone table is known to contain errors;
the people we cribbed it from had errors in their tables.  So don't take
it too seriously.

>The list is incomplete -- I know of several other abbreviations I haven't
>yet been able to interpret.  The list may also contain errors -- I welcome
>corrections.

The basic problems are:  local goverments change the definitions (e.g. in
the USSR now, where some of Stalin's time changes are being reversed or
exaggerated); there are conflicts (e.g. how many countries claim IST and
IDT?); and people seem to just make them up as they go along.

The solution is to abolish use of alphabetic time zone names, which RFCs
1122/1123 also encourage.  Alphabetic time zone names just don't work.
(Well, "GMT" is fairly well understood.)
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff