Subject: Re: [PATCH] strbuf: let strbuf_addftime handle %z and %Z itself

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2017 11:15:15 -0700

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 6:56 PM, Ulrich Mueller <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> Please don't. Outputting invented information for something that
>> really isn't in the data is worse than outputting no information at
>> all.
>
> It's not invented information. %z being +0900 is the same thing as %Z
> being JST since +0900 == JST, just because some other things are also
> == +0900 that doesn't mean that JST is invalid or less useful than
> +0900 or "" for the purposes of human-readable output.

Ulrich is right.  The issue is not if JST is a possibly correct
answer.

GMT offset alone does not tell us anything about which one of the
zones that happen to share the same value is associated with the
committer (or author) time, and picking one at random to pretend
that we know more than we actually do is a disservice to the users.