pytz question: GMT vs. UTC topic

According ato the pytz doc (http://pytz.sourceforge.net/):

"‘UTC’ is Universal Time, also known as Greenwich Mean Timeor GMT in
the United Kingdom."

If they are equal, why don't timezone objects created from those two
strings compare equal?

>>> pytz.timezone("UTC") == pytz.timezone("GMT")
False

(I'm revealing my complete ignorance of timezone manipulation by
asking this question.)

Thx,

Skip

Re: pytz question: GMT vs. UTC topic

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 4:29 AM, Skip Montanaro <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> According ato the pytz doc (http://pytz.sourceforge.net/):
>
> "‘UTC’ is Universal Time, also known as Greenwich Mean Time or GMT in
> the United Kingdom."
>
> If they are equal, why don't timezone objects created from those two
> strings compare equal?
>
>>>> pytz.timezone("UTC") == pytz.timezone("GMT")
> False

There are some technical differences between UTC and GMT, which almost
never come up, and which I very much doubt are significant here (does
pytz care about leap seconds?). But what I'm seeing - at least in the
version of pytz that I picked up by typing 'sudo pip install pytz' on
Debian Wheezy - is that the two are different types. UTC seems to be a
special case, while GMT is like the others. That may be why they're
not comparing equal, even though all operations might happen to
produce the same results.

ChrisA