From: "Philip Paeps" <philip@trouble.is>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: linux-man@vger.kernel.org, Time Zone Mailing List <tz@iana.org>,
Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [tz] "time zone" vs "timezone" in documentation
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 20:21:36 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <017B8EE9-13ED-47E0-B6C2-913BE5E77F60@trouble.is> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <2892e775-1503-ac52-4401-785bef9b1284@cs.ucla.edu>
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
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-06-22 18:21 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <20180619013049.4097-1-eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
[not found] ` <9838498d-0dc2-b51f-08af-fb447196cce5@gmail.com>
[not found] ` <26ec9696-f120-15e7-9d9f-9a66eefce9a0@cs.ucla.edu>
2018-06-22 16:18 ` [tz] "time zone" vs "timezone" in documentation Paul Eggert
2018-06-22 18:21 ` Philip Paeps [this message]
2018-06-27 19:46 ` Paul Eggert
2018-07-04 7:35 ` Walter Harms
2018-06-22 18:52 ` Robert Elz
2018-06-22 19:54 ` Paul Eggert
2018-06-22 20:14 ` Clive D.W. Feather
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