[tz] Asia/Tomsk

Ian Abbott abbotti at mev.co.uk
Wed May 25 16:16:00 UTC 2016


On 25/05/2016 15:35, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> As a citizen of Tomsk, I would like to raise some questions concerning
> the recent addition of the Asia/Tomsk timezone. As you know, this time
> zone's abbreviation is all numeric:
>
> Zone    Asia/Tomsk       5:39:51 -      LMT     1919 Dec 22
>                           6:00   -       +06     1930 Jun 21
>                           7:00   Russia  +07/+08 1991 Mar 31  2:00s
>                           6:00   Russia  +06/+07 1992 Jan 19  2:00s
>                           7:00   Russia  +07/+08 2002 May  1  3:00
>                           6:00   Russia  +06/+07 2011 Mar 27  2:00s
>                           7:00   -       +07     2014 Oct 26  2:00s
>                           6:00   -       +06     2016 May 29  2:00s
>                           7:00   -       +07
>
> In my opinion, it is bad for two reasons:
>
> 1. zic warns that 'warning: time zone abbreviation differs from POSIX standard (+06)'

Recent enough versions of zic don't issue that warning.  If you wanted 
to put such an abbreviation in a POSIX-style TZ environment variable 
value, it would need to be placed in angle brackets like this:

   TZ='<+07>-7'

(which, admittedly, looks a little odd, but that's the fault of UNIX 
tradition).

> 2. Such an abbreviation is not user friendly and even borders on
> offensive. A locality deserves a name!

On the positive side, at least it lets the user know how far the time 
zone is from UTC!

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti at mev.co.uk> )=-
-=(                          Web: http://www.mev.co.uk/  )=-


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