The special area of “Etc” is used for some administrative zones, particularly for “Etc/UTC” which represents Coordinated Universal Time. In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with “Etc/GMT” have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the “Etc” area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g “Etc/GMT-14” is 14 hours ahead of GMT).
According to NIST, Eastern Time is UTC-4. And currently it is 5:04pm EDT, and in London (a city in GMT/UTC+0) it is 10:04pm. Which is 5 hours ahead (because America is dumb and has daylight savings).
Which is also backed up by your article. Americas/Indianapolis is the one I normally use since I’m in Indiana.
Then the UK’s equally dumb: it was 10:04 pm BST (GMT+1) cos daylight savings is a thing in most of Europe too. At least it’s synchronised across Europe[1] so you just need to remember that most[2] of North America changes a few weeks earlier.
Also, the UK says GMT/BST which is nice and clear - calling both EST and EDT “Eastern Time” makes even more of a mess!
And yes, I’ve just rediscovered you can use footnotes, why do you ask?
The EU is planning on killing daylight savings but I have no idea if the UK will do the sensible thing and go along when/if this happens ↩︎
Yeah, you would’ve thought it would work that way. Regrettably, the standard timezone code of
Etc/GMT+4is actually GMT-4. Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Area
According to NIST, Eastern Time is UTC-4. And currently it is 5:04pm EDT, and in London (a city in GMT/UTC+0) it is 10:04pm. Which is 5 hours ahead (because America is dumb and has daylight savings).
Which is also backed up by your article.
Americas/Indianapolisis the one I normally use since I’m in Indiana.Then the UK’s equally dumb: it was 10:04 pm BST (GMT+1) cos daylight savings is a thing in most of Europe too. At least it’s synchronised across Europe[1] so you just need to remember that most[2] of North America changes a few weeks earlier.
Also, the UK says GMT/BST which is nice and clear - calling both EST and EDT “Eastern Time” makes even more of a mess!
And yes, I’ve just rediscovered you can use footnotes, why do you ask?
The EU is planning on killing daylight savings but I have no idea if the UK will do the sensible thing and go along when/if this happens ↩︎
thanks for making it more confusing, Mexico ↩︎