Re: CET timezone

Thanks for the responses so far.

Edmund wrote:
> If you ever need to ask a user which timezone they are in the easiest
> way is to ask them where they are. Hence the 'Europe/Paris' is best.
> They are also easy to translate into other languages, which English
> abbreviations are not.

The user is a customer who is a sysadmin on Solaris. He's setting the  
server's timezone to CET. We have our catalyst application starting up  
with this default server timezone and it is failing because the CET  
timezone is not recognised in DateTime.

We don't present timezones to the user yet, though I accept that the  
string 'Europe/Paris' is better than the abbreviations.

On 18 Aug 2008, at 16:01, Zefram wrote:

> Ton Voon wrote:
>> timezones, but DateTime doesn't support the timezone CET. Is there a
>> reason for it?
>
> The lettered abbreviations for timezones are generally ambiguous.
> Most famously, there's an "EST" in both America and Australia.  I  
> don't
> think there's any "CET" other than Central European Time, though.
> Generally these abbreviations are deprecated.
>
> CET is almost certainly not what you want, though.  CET is a fixed
> offset of UT+1h.  The civil time in west-central continental Europe is
> UT+1h during the winter and UT+2h (Central European Summer Time, CEST)
> during the summer.  I'm not aware of any short name for this CET/CEST
> combination.  CET is year-round civil time only in certain equatorial
> countries, such as Angola.

If I run "TZ=CET date" on Solaris and Linux (debian sarge), I get a  
correct time with the timezone displayed as CEST. This says that the  
CET timezone information at the OS level is switching between  
daylights saving correctly.

So I have a political issue (why are timezones always like that? :) )  
where Solaris is quite happily accepting CET as a timezone, but I have  
to go back and say "can you switch to Europe/Paris instead?".

I can understand the arguments about EST, but if there's no ambiguity  
about CET, would it be correct to add that in? I note that EST, MST  
and HST are supported timezones: http://search.cpan.org/dist/DateTime-TimeZone/ 
.

If it is just a case of adding CET in, I'll happily spend the time to  
do it, provide a patch and document the steps required. But I'm just  
trying to understand the arguments against this first.

Ton

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