[tz] Astrakhan region got approval to change its time zone

[Tim Parenti]

On 16 February 2016 at 02:25, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> I really doubt whether they'll think they're on Samara time. Samara is
> roughly a 17-hour nonstop drive north. That would be like people in San
> Diego thinking that they're on Portland time.


That's not a particular obstacle; we already use SAMT for the Udmurt
Republic as well, and Samara is an 8-hour drive south of its largest city,
Izhevsk.  The two areas aren't contiguous as it is; adding a third would
not seem to be a concern.

On 16 February 2016 at 11:37, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> I would like to remove all invented abbreviations from the database in due
> course, not just the invented Russian abbreviations.


I agree with the general sentiment I've seen here a few times that, e.g.,
"UTC+0400" is preferable to "+0400" which is preferable to "+04"; the
latter are wholly redundant with the "%z" and "%:::z" format strings
offered by date, so I see no good reason to manually encode that data a
second time as strings.

If we want to "get out of the abbreviation business," I think that's an
argument for improving our toolchain accordingly, rather than shoving this
into the legacy system.  Insofar as SAMT is already a perfectly good
(albeit invented) abbreviation for this purpose, perhaps this is a
transition which should be planned out more and rolled-out together across
a wider set of zones once our toolchain can support it.

--
Tim Parenti
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