this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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It should be implemented in people's brains.
How this goes, usually, is:
Them:...before 6PM.
Me: 6PM... Ours? The server's? The user's?
Them: GMT, of course.
Me: So that's 7PM London right now, and changes to 6PM in November?
Them: What no are you stupid. Always 6PM GMT.
Me:* jumps off a cliff*
Sorry, but are you under the impression that GMT means London time, or that it observes British Summer Time?
UK is under BST (UTC+1) for half the year but people are usually just taught that the UK is GMT (UTC+0) which is based in the time in Greenwich, withought mentioning DST. I suppose it's also possible everyone is taught BST and just forgets about it because daylight savings sucks, but either way most people seem to think GMT and UK time are the same thing.
This means you'll get people asking for GMT times when they want BST or UK local time.
Can confirm. Thought UK was always gmt+0, Paris/Amsterdam/whatever GMT+1, etc. (thought it was the clock that changed, not the timezone, if you know what I mean)
I too was similarly confused by the original comment at first, but I think they're referring to the fact that 6pm GMT is 7pm in London during the summer (BST), and 6pm in London the rest of the year. It seems OP and "them" are both correct in that hypothetical exchange.
The term UT is specifically created to divorce universal timekeeping from whatever UK's timezone is doing, whether DST is on or not, etc. and the derived term UTC for when started adding leap seconds.
GMT hasn't been a thing since UTC. It should be scrubbed from the vocabulary and old farts still using it should be shunned and reeducated.
Reminds me of a LARP I was on one time. A group of people I was doing stuff with ended up always meeting at 10 because we redefined "10" to mean "whenever we all meet".
Don’t get it. Is this implying GMT has daylight savings?
GMT doesn't have daylight savings, but most people won't be as precise in language. Here in Germany, we might also tell people "GMT+2", even though it changes to GMT+1 in winter. Like, I don't even know what the correct shorthand would be for our timezone...
It’s CET/CEST (MEZ/MESZ in German)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time
CET?
That is why lots of time zone selectors allow you to select "Europe/Berlin": then it is clear that depending on the time of year this is UTC+1 or UTC+2.
I use TZ identifiers, and confirm the expected behaviour ("Berlin time, correct?"), as then I know how I should handle DST changes.
GMT doesn’t have daylight savings but London does