[docs] [issue36240] Definitions of time

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle <p.ganssle at gmail.com> added the comment:

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.

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue36240>
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