On 2018-06-22 18:18:36 (+0200), Paul Eggert wrote:
[I am cc'ing this to the tz mailing list (and changing the subject
line) to give tz readers a heads-up about the terminology issue. The
question here is: should tzdb man pages say "time zone" or "timezone"?
For context please see Michael Kerrisk's email
<https://marc.info/?m=152964652828320>, which says:
When I inherited the project, the pages used a mixture of "time zone"
and "timezone", with the former predominant. I nevertheless
standardized on the latter, and although I don't recall for sure, I
suspect it was because that is the spelling used in POSIX. (As an
aside, there's an argument that--because POSIX--tzdb might want to
consider switching spellings.) I'm not religious about the particular
choice (although I have naturally now got used to the particular
choice I made some years ago), but I did make that choice because I
want consistency within the project, and I'm reluctant to introduce
inconsistency.
and my response <https://marc.info/?m=152964676331902>, which says:
I deferred to POSIX for "timestamp" versus "time stamp", but
"timezone" is a bridge too far for me.
]
On second thought, perhaps I was too hasty. We could distinguish "time
zone" in the usual English-language sense (a set of geographic
locations that currently share the same standard time offset from UTC)
from "timezone" in the POSIX sense (a history and predicted future of
UTC offsets, abbreviations and isdst flags). If so, the tzdb
documentation could be more careful about using "time zone" for the
former and "timezone" for the latter, and this would make for fewer
changes to the GNU/Linux man-pages for tzdb. I can look into this and
propose an updated set of tzdb-related patches accordingly.
This sounds like a good idea. Consistency is important.
If I were designing the terminology from scratch, I wouldn't specify
two nearly-identical phrases "time zone" and "timezone" to mean such
different things. However, the phrases do have the advantage of
existing practice (common English usage and POSIX, respectively).
Clearly, POSIX and English are different languages. :)
(I feel sharp stabbing sensations in my eyes every time I encounter a
timestamp or a timezone (or a filesystem, for that matter)).
Philip
--
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information
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