[tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone

[Matt Johnson]

How can we even hope to achieve time zone abbreviations that follow what people use on the ground if some places don't use abbreviations at all?

We also impose English abbreviations, when English might not be spoken in the region at all.  IIRC, doesn't French Canada have abbreviations like HNE instead of EST?

Personally, I'd rather see abbreviations removed entirely. If folks want them for display, they should probably get them from CLDR, where the can be properly localized.  All we really need in tzdb is a flag to identify whether to use a standard-time or daylight-time version of the abbreviation.  Am I wrong?

I suppose some of the historical values like those used in "war time" wouldn't be in cldr, but couldn't those be moved to a separate file?
________________________________
From: Alan Barrett<mailto:apb at cequrux.com>
Sent: ‎4/‎2/‎2015 12:57 PM
To: tz at iana.org<mailto:tz at iana.org>
Subject: Re: [tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone

On Wed, 01 Apr 2015, Dzmitry Kazimirchyk wrote:
> The main problem here is with MSK being both historically and
> nowadays widely known as "Moscow time" and absolutely zero
> public awareness of the fact that now it can also mean "Minsk
> time" in addition to lack of any official sources explaining
> that.

What time zone abbreviation do people, news media, or official
government sources in Belarus use to refer to their time zone?

If there is a simple answer, than that's what should go into
the tz database.  If people on the ground disagree about the
abreviation, then we can conduct some sort of popularity survey,
as we did with Australia and the EST versus AEST question.  If
people on the ground don't use any abbreviation, then I suppose
the tz project has to guess or invent something.

--apb (Alan Barrett)
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