LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Glen Turner <glen.turner@adelaide.edu.au>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 14:35:33 +1030

Re: Daylight Savings Time

Alan Kennington wrote:

> I'm pretty sure that the last time I heard this question
> being discussed, the answer was that in Australia we
> do _not_ have Ds in out time standard names.

The official names (from the Daylight Savings Act, 1971) are:

  South Australian standard time

and

  South Australian summer time

Neither the Act nor the Regulations under the Act give an
official abbreviation (a common oversight in legislation).

So the competent authority to establish an "official" abbreviation
would be CSIRO's National Measurement Laboratory, followed by (if
CSIRO doesn't care) the SA Office of Consumer and Business Affairs'
Standards Laboratory.

I don't suggest you ring them and waste their time.  Set the
abbreviation to whatever you will with a clear conscience.

I suggest you don't use "CSST", some old software dies on four
character time zone abbreviations.  Personally, I use "CST" and
"CDT" -- this causes some problems with software assuming that I
mean the US time zones.  Similarly, "SAST" would have most
people thinking "South Africa".

Robert Elz's choice of using "Australia/Adelaide" as the time
zone name starts to make a lot of sense.  Note that the legislation
allows the Adelaide time zone to potentially differ from time zones
elsewhere in the state.

In short, time in Australia is a disaster zone.  Ironically, the
Commonwealth has the Constitutional power of weights and measures
and could fix all this fuss with one Act of Parliament.

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