[tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone
Paul Eggert
eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Sat Apr 4 21:32:52 UTC 2015
Dzmitry Kazimirchyk wrote:
> I think AST (a.k.a Arabia Standard Time) in its both full and abbreviated forms
> is used to denote time in Iraq both locally and internationally and it was not
> the TZ database who first introduced this tradition.
No, I introduced the abbreviation "AST" for Arabia Standard Time in the 1990s,
as part of my contributions to the tz database. As far as I know it was not
part of any local or international convention. It seemed like a good idea at
the time. Given the controversy over what "MSK" stands for, though, ...
> there is a wide agreement that "Minsk time" and "Moscow time" are not the same terms
Yes.
> community should have picked the abbreviation as per standard procedure
The dispute here is over what the "standard procedure" is. The guidelines
mainly attempt to record the informal thought processes I used while
contributing to the tz database since the early 1990s. These processes produced
many abbreviations that I invented purely because the database format required
*something* even though no abbreviations were actually in common use.
Here's an example of what these thought processes produced: since 1998 in the tz
database the abbreviation MMT has stood for both "Minsk Mean Time" (in use
1924-1930) and "Moscow Mean Time" (1916-1918). The analogy to MSK should be
obvious.
> 3. I've brought up an example of Kazakhstan
Sure, and Kazakhstan uses (for lack of a better term) an "Asiatic" style, which
I invented only because *something* is required there, and which has never
really caught on in English-language usage. It's better not to invent more
abbreviations like that if we don't have to, as seems to be the case here.
(Plus, we wouldn't want to confuse non-expert users into thinking that Minsk is
in Asia....)
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