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Author p-ganssle
Recipients Robert Billing, belopolsky, docs@python, mark.dickinson, p-ganssle
Date 2019-03-11.18:51:12
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Message-id <1552330272.92.0.0357194808934.issue36240@roundup.psfhosted.org>
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I also think it would be ideal to avoid getting into too much detail about the definitions of UTC and GMT in a general sense. Instead, we should probably refer to some better source on the matter and maybe focus on how UTC and GMT are used *in this document*?

For example, the `gmtime` function is explicitly defined in terms of UTC in the documentation, and just has a possibly slightly inaccurate name. Perhaps a wording like "Occasionally the abbreviations 'GMT' and 'UTC' are used interchangeably, despite the fact that this is somewhat inaccurate. For more information about the difference between UTC and GMT, see <external source>."

As something of an aside, the same bullet point says this:

> The acronym UTC is not a mistake but a compromise between English and French.

This came up recently on the tz mailing list, where it was claimed that there is no contemporary evidence to support this: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2019-March/027736.html

It may be worth removing this sentence or rewording it to be more neutral, like "The acronym UTC is not a mistake but conforms to an earlier, language-agnostic naming scheme for time standards: UT0, UT1, etc." I can move the discussion of the "UTC acronym" wording into a separate ticket if it's distracting from this one.
History
Date User Action Args
2019-03-11 18:51:12p-gansslesetrecipients: + p-ganssle, mark.dickinson, belopolsky, docs@python, Robert Billing
2019-03-11 18:51:12p-gansslesetmessageid: <1552330272.92.0.0357194808934.issue36240@roundup.psfhosted.org>
2019-03-11 18:51:12p-gansslelinkissue36240 messages
2019-03-11 18:51:12p-gansslecreate