• (nodebb)

    A major company you have definitely heard of and depending upon the size of the area you live in, they may even have a bank branch near you.

    So, Crédit Agricole? BNP Paribas? LCL?

  • (nodebb)

    Any WTF about time zones must be acknowledged as suffering from the fact that time zones are truly not understandable in their full glory by the average developer. Take pity on them while you burn their code and start over.

  • (nodebb)

    My understanding of TZDB is that while it is maintained by committee now, before late 2011 it was mostly maintained by one guy - Paul Eggert. He originally came up with those naming conventions shown here back in 1993.

  • Dan Swartzendruber (unregistered)

    I once bought something on ebay, coming from somewhere in California. UPS tracking showed 4 updates with increasing dates as it moved eastward (lived in MA at the time). Except. One location halfway there showed a location in Texas 5 years earlier. To the TARDIS, Robin!

  • David in America/Chicago (unregistered)

    As for the TZDB, I've been a contributor since it was hosted at HHS. TRWTF is that time zones are created by people. TRWTF with the example provided is that the TZDB identifiers are not meant for human consumption; we strongly recommend that implementors choose the subset of zones that make sense for them and present them with friendlier names.

    FWIW, we need to keep all the time zones that have existed during the Unix epoch going back to 1970 so that displayed time is correct. Since 1970, Indiana has shifted its time zone boundaries a few times and gone back and forth on Daylight Saving Time, which is why Indiana has such a cluster of zones.

  • (nodebb) in reply to pgn674

    Indeed, here's St. Paul's epistle about naming:

    https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/1993-October/009233.html

  • (nodebb)

    Whoever submitted that list of timezones at the end as never set up a Linux box from scratch. The Debian installer always shows that list. It's quite recognizable.

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to Ralf

    Funny you should say that because I hadn't installed or used Linux for over 10 years until about a month ago and if any of the installs I've done since showed me that list, I didn't notice it. I can say for sure that the one I did yesterday just defaulted to my timezone so I didn't even look at the list. I've only worked with relatively downstream distros, not sure if that makes a difference.

    Thanks to everyone for the context and tidbits.

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