<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Paul Eggert <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu" target="_blank">eggert@cs.ucla.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="">On 11/03/2016 08:27 AM, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:<br>
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Isn't this problem worse with the UTC offset?<br>
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Only if one assumes that a time zone abbreviation reflects the user's location, so that VLAT means "Vladivostok time, whatever that happens to be". In English the usual assumption is that a time zone abbreviation reflects the user's UTC offset, so that CST means "US Central Standard Time, 6 hours behind UTC", even if one's location is Mérida (which is not in the central US or even in central North America). A numeric abbreviation matches this usual assumption better than VLAT does.</blockquote></div><br>Yes, I've been inconvenienced by the fact that MSK does not always mean +03 (or was it +04 or +02 back then?), but does the convenience of having an unambiguous many to one mapping of abbreviations to UTC offsets outweigh the problem of date command output from older systems being no longer parseable?</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">I think the disruption could be minimized by postulating the current values and only changing the historical data where the postulated values are not correct. For VLAT it means postulating that VLAT=UTC+10 and changing VLAT to +11 for times prior to the last reform of 2014.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">In the good old times Russia (USSR) had a way to deal with varying UTC offsets. We had the notion of the "decree time". When Moscow transitioned from UTC+02 to UTC+03 in the early XX century, the new timezone was still called the 2nd timezone, but the new time was distinguished as Moscow Decree Time (and if anyone would come up with an abbreviation back then - it would probably be MDT or in the contemporary style MosDeTi :-). Unfortunately with a later introduction of the Summer Time (and briefly Double Summer Time) the term Decree Time became ambiguous. I remember that when Decree time was reintroduced in the 90s together with the Summer time, some people incorrectly referred to the Summer time as Decree time and for this reason the term Decree time was disfavored.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">In any case, while I agree that in theory the new scheme is somewhat better than the old one, changes like this that are not driven by the actual change in timekeeping practices should not be made without soliciting input from users in the affected regions first. </div></div>