[tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone

[Arthur David Olson]

> Then we should somehow try to encourage the development of new UN*X APIs
to get "long" time zone names and
> the deprecation of the use of the abbreviations and the tzname[] array
that points to them.

Early POSIX drafts referred to "time zone name;" after some effort, this
was changed to "time zone name or abbreviation."
So there's standard recognition that names are distinct from abbreviations
and that both can be useful.

    @dashdashado

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 7:29 PM, Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

>
> On Apr 3, 2015, at 12:22 AM, Matt Johnson <mj1856 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Personally, I'd rather see abbreviations removed entirely. If folks want
> them for display, they should probably get them from CLDR, where the can be
> properly localized.
>
> Sounds good to me, although...
>
> > I suppose some of the historical values like those used in "war time"
> wouldn't be in cldr, but couldn't those be moved to a separate file?
>
> ...*somebody* would need to provide that file.  Perhaps we could provide
> "fallback" abbreviations for everything, but that might not sufficiently
> encourage vendors of software using the tz database from using the CLDR
> rather than the TZ database.
>
> The CLDR is set up with "metazones"; a given tzdb zone might use multiple
> metazones, e.g.
>
>         <timezone type="Atlantic/Azores">
>                 <usesMetazone to="1992-09-27 02:00" mzone="Azores"/>
>                 <usesMetazone to="1993-03-28 01:00" from="1992-09-27
> 02:00" mzone="Europe_Western"/>
>                 <usesMetazone from="1993-03-28 01:00" mzone="Azores"/>
>         </timezone>
>
> The en.xml file in the copy of the CLDR I have says:
>
>         <metazone type="Azores">
>                 <long>
>                         <generic>Azores Time</generic>
>                         <standard>Azores Standard Time</standard>
>                         <daylight>Azores Summer Time</daylight>
>                 </long>
>         </metazone>
>
> so it supplies three long names - and *no* abbreviations - for the
> "Azores" metazone.  It also supplies no abbreviations for "Europe_Western".
>
> So we might want to supply abbreviations for the benefit of software that
> *has* to provide them, e.g. so as not to surprise UN*X software that
> expects them in the output of, for example, the "date" command, and have a
> strong disclaimer that the abbreviations might have been made up by the
> tzdb maintainers and that one should *not* expect people in the locale in
> question to use them.
>
> Then we should somehow try to encourage the development of new UN*X APIs
> to get "long" time zone names and the deprecation of the use of the
> abbreviations and the tzname[] array that points to them.
>
> Perhaps by 2038 UN*X programs will no longer use the abbreviations. :-)
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