Re: [PATCH] use UTC instead of GMT

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 11:19:03AM +0200, Natanael Copa wrote:
> GMT is a timezone officially used by some countries in Europe and
> Africa. UTC is not a timezone, but a time standard. No country or
> territory officialy uses UTC as local time.
> 
> Also, POSIX mentions UTC a few places[1][2] but never GMT (except as an
> example[2] for a timezone)
> 
> So it makes more sense to use UTC instead of GMT and return UTC when no
> timezone is set in /etc/localtime or TZ is set to empty.
> 
> [1]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gmtime.html
> [2]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/timezone.html
> ---
> 
> This causes real problems for people:
> https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/issues/310#issuecomment-316732179

The motivation for the naming was that POSIX "UTC" is not actually UTC
but something like UT1 or modified UTC more akin to historical GMT.
You can certainly get it to show "UTC" just by setting TZ=UTC, but
if users are actually hitting problems from this it should be reviewed
whether the behavior still makes sense.

Rich