MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

Australian timezones to become unique

Posted on 2009-11-10 21:00:00
Tags: zoneinfo, Australia, DST

System administrators in Australia have had this issue for ages: While the Australia/Sydney timezone is known as EST:

[~] edwin@k7>TZ=Australia/Sydney date
Tue Nov 10 21:29:22 EST 2009
The EST timezone is laying somewhere else:
[~] edwin@k7>TZ=EST date
Tue Nov 10 05:29:44 EST 2009
16 hours difference, that is the US East Coast. Thus, you can't use the timezone EST to specify Australian specific times and expect the rest of the world to get in sync with you. Even worse, there is software out there which is still broken on it.

The issue has been brought up multiple times with the maintainers of the timezone data, but they only collect what is defined, they don't want to make the definitions themselves.

But there is hope! According to The Australian Government website, there are three timezones in Australia:

So real soon, hopefully, the timezone data maintainers will incorperate the changes and our systems will not be confused anymore when we configure our timezones as Australia/Sydney, then we will get AEST and nobody will be confused with us anymore!

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