Russia autumn 1996 DST patch

Paul Eggert eggert at twinsun.com
Fri Oct 4 02:05:23 UTC 1996


I'm not completely convinced by the technical part of your argument.
However, since you're the person on the spot, I guess we should follow
your advice and use `MSK'/`MSD'.  I'll draft a revised patch along
these lines.

It would help if you could send me your recollection of where these
abbreviations came from; I can put them in as comments.  For example,
you wrote that MSK and MSD have been used for 10 years or more, but
they've been in the tz database only for 3 years or so; where were
they used before that?


   From: Andrey A. Chernov <ache at nagual.ru>
   Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 14:23:10 +0400 (MSD)
 
   > I just took a census of Usenet articles on file at
   > twinsun.com that had Moscow time in their `Date:' line, followed by
 
   Usenet RFC 1036 _not_ allows usage of timezone abbreviations except few
   standard North American timezones
 
The `Date:' lines that I was talking about all had the time zone
abbreviations as comments in parentheses, e.g.:
 
        Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 02:25:38 +0400 (WSU DST)
 
This is allowed by RFC 822 and is recommended by son-of-RFC-1036 (see
<URL:ftp://ftp.zoo.toronto.edu/pub/news.txt.Z>).

I looked into those WSU DST dates some more and found that they all
came from glas.apc.org
(e.g. <URL:news:APC&63'0'1dd99a0b'd25 at glas.apc.org>); perhaps it's an
old gateway.

I noticed also, by the way, that `MST' was used for `Moscow summer
time' in some English-language reports of preliminary returns in the
Russian presidential election; e.g. see
<URL:news:APC&63'0'4e79b8c1'8b4 at glas.apc.org> (1996-06-17), which you
can find by visiting <URL:http://dejanews.com/forms/dnq.html> and
searching for `"Moscow summer time" MST' in the Old Usenet database.



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