Information wanted #1: time zone names in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine

Tobias Conradi tobias.conradi at gmail.com
Tue Sep 27 15:01:08 UTC 2011


>> What we should really be doing is making it clear to one and all that
>> these abbreviations are meaningless, rather than FET or EEFT or BYT or
>> anything else, call all the Russian (and related) zones "EST" (they're
>> Eastern, with respect to most of Europe anyway, and they have a standard
>> time), for no better reason than to make it clear to everyone that the
>> abbreviations have no practical purpose, and are better never used,
>> anywhere.
>
> In fact, rather than the abbreviations, I'd rather see designations based
> somehow on the corresponding international timezones (/chasovyye poyasa/).
> That's the long established practice here, after all. Something like UTC+3
> or Z02+1 (w/r to the 0..23 numbering) would make do nicely both for Belarus
> and Ukraine, at least.
Using UTC+3 would according to tzcode2011i\Theory violate POSIX until 2000.

Citation:
-----
	Use abbreviations that consist of three or more ASCII letters.

...

	This rule guarantees that all abbreviations could have
		been specified by a POSIX TZ string.  POSIX
		requires at least three characters for an
		abbreviation.  POSIX through 2000 says that an abbreviation
		cannot start with ':', and cannot contain ',', '-',
		'+',
---------


> But if an abbreviation must exist, after all,
>let it be something sensible,
> like, well, EEFT, or, in fact, EEET.

I run a website where I expect to have a letter only value. The UTC+3
value exists anyway. Judging whether something is sensible needs a
rule set for what is sensible or not.

I do not see any precedence that alphabetic order (F comes after E)
has been used before, and I also don't see that written in Theory.
Therefore I think FET is less based on common practice and written
down rules than EEFT.

If sensibility refers to common practice and written down rules, then
EEFT is more sensible than FET.

-- 
Tobias Conradi
Rheinsberger Str. 18
10115 Berlin
Germany

http://tobiasconradi.com/tobias_conradi



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