[tz] [PATCH] Change abbreviation of Sri Lanka standard time to SLST

[Pavel V. Rochnyack]

20.10.2016 3:26, Paul Eggert пишет:
> On 10/19/2016 03:40 AM, Karel Volný wrote:
>>
>> the problem is, as far as _other_ people are concerned, they find the 
>> classical abbreviations useful
>>
>
> Not many people object to truly classical abbreviations like GMT and 
> EST; it's our inventions like LKT that are more problematic.
>
>> I believe vitually everyone in Russia able to read Latin could 
>> understand what YAKT means
>
> Hmm, well, I just now did a Google search for "YAKT site:ru" and the 
> first match was for a Russian-language description of Yakt, Montana 
> (and I've visited near Yakt and it's beautiful country - but it's not 
> Yakutsk). 

Did you try to do similar search with other abbreviations?

For example, i found (in 'europe'): AMT - it marked as 'invented', none 
of the first  20 matches time zone abbreviation, but it still in 
database. When it will be removed?

I have just tried:

Australia: AWDT, AWST, LINT, MHT, KOST, NRT
Asia: SGT, AST, XJT
North America: HDT, HST (America/Adak), AKDT, AKST (America/Nome), HST 
(Zone Pacific/Honolulu)

None of 50 first matches for these searches are not about time (skip 
timezone converter sites, they are based on tzdata).
I think, the same can be said about _any_ abbreviation.

For HDT even timezoneconverter sites are not in search results.

Did you still find google search is reasonable instrument to detect if 
abbreviation is widely-used?

> None of the first ten matches were about Yakutsk time. With 
> more-specialized searches one can find instances of "YAKT" to mean 
> Yakutsk time, largely because of the tzdata invention in earlier 
> releases. But it's more common for English-language sources to call it 
> "Yakutsk time" with no abbreviation; or when abbreviations are used, 
> to say something like "UTC+9" or "MSK+6".

The same can be said about _any_ abbreviation.

>
>> it is very bad that the change was done in a way that it applies even 
>> for older timestamps
>
> The tzdata time zone abbreviations are proleptic. That is, they are 
> the English-language abbreviations we use *now* for old time stamps, 
> and these abbreviations may differ from abbreviations used back then 
> (often because hardly anybody used abbreviations back then). It might 
> be nice to also support contemporaneous abbreviations, or 
> abbreviations based on tzdata release number, but that would be a 
> harder task and I will be happy to let some other project take it on 
> if there is interest.

Then just remove abbreviations completely.But you somehow think that 
they are important to some people and unimportant to others.

-- 
Regards,

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