Updated Australian time zone names/strings

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Tue, 17 Apr 2001 01:58:35 -0700 (PDT)
    From:        Paul Eggert <eggert at twinsun.com>
    Message-ID:  <200104170858.BAA08429 at green-office.twinsun.com>

  | I can see two arguments against this approach:

Yes, both of those apply.

  | Here's another possibility: add a TZ extension that would let users
  | substitute their own abbreviations.

We already have that.   That is, we have TZ=/whatever/file/you/like
and that file can contain whatever is appropriate (according to
whoever set the TZ variable) already.  Further it will support all
of the historic abbreviations.

Further, admins, if they desire can alter the system wide (no TZ setting)
values trivially easily.

The only question in all of this is what ought to be being distributed
by you and ado (and to a lesser extent by the rest of this list) as being
the "standard" (or at least, commonly accepted) abbreviations to use.

Other than simply changing what is there, or creating a whole bunch of
alternatives and then make it up to the local installer to pick, about the
only thing I can see worth doing to the code/data might be to provide an
option (set via an env var, or some other way - perhaps even something as
crude as the perms on the tzdata file being used) which would cause the
tz abbreviations to be always returned as a string like "+1000" (ie: the
code does an sprintf of the offset, and that is what is returned as the
abbreviation, rather than the EST thing).

kre