[tz] Asia/Tomsk

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Wed, 1 Jun 2016 23:59:57 -0700
    From:        Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu>
    Message-ID:  <574FD96D.60403 at cs.ucla.edu>

  | And I have some experience in this, as I am the one who *invented* 
  | that "long tradition", and I've seen it not catch on.

Actually, I suspect that in many cases you're wrong - some of the
abbreviations that are in use were certainly invented by the TZ project,
and hence, all uses of them will source back to tzdata eventually, but
regardless of that, since they have now been around so long, they have become
the standard timezone name abbreviations, as much as any such thing exists.

I know that the one for Thailand (Asia/Bangkok) (ITC) was an invention,
but now it is in quite widespread use (and in a country with only one zone,
and hence no real need for names at all, that's remarkable.)

It really is too late now to wish that the abbreviations had not been
invented, or to wonder how anyone here got the right to do that - sometimes
things just happen - but afterwards, they're just as entrenched as
anything else.

I also don't really think it rational to penalise areas that don't commonly
use English and hence aren't likely to have English abbreviations, while
allowing the English speaking world to do as they like.

kre