Re: [Exim] EST vs US/Eastern Timezone setting

Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: John W. Baxter
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] EST vs US/Eastern Timezone setting
On 8/6/2004 4:35, "Philip Hazel" <ph10@???> wrote:

> On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Mark T. Valites wrote:
>
>> In the rev of solaris I'm using, TZ is set to US/Eastern, not EST, and
>> setting 'timezone = US/Eastern' in my config file gives me correct
>> timestamps.
>>
>> I'm not overly familiar with the intricacies of Unix timestamps, or even
>> really sure this is an error - is this the fault of my OS or a small bug?
>
> I'm not familiar with the intricacies of all the timezones either. Nor
> indeed of how they work in Solaris. Checking on my Gentoo Linux box, I
> see that the data for "EST" is different (and smaller) from
> "US/Eastern". Looks like EST doesn't do daylight saving (at a guess).
> This was my misapprehension. Sorry about that. The whole area is very
> murky. I've made a note in case the book is ever revised.


I really wouldn't expect EST to do daylight time, since the S is "Standard".
This hasn't mattered so much in public discourse over here since the
railroads stopped printing their passenger timetables in Standard time year
round (sometime around the 1960s). But over here, we tend to think of xST
as Standard time. And there are areas which use EST rather than US/Eastern.

Our Congress didn't help much a few years ago by trying to rename Daylight
time as "Advanced Standard Time". Most people paid no attention, and I
think Congress gave up.

--John