[tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone

Dzmitry Kazimirchyk dkazimirchyk at gmail.com
Sat Apr 4 07:38:34 UTC 2015


On 04/04/2015 03:28 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>
>> the large distance between the areas covered by Pacific
>> Standard Time and Pitcairn Standard Time make this very different
>
> They are not different if one excludes political considerations and
> focuses on timekeeping considerations, which is what we ought to do
> here.  And there are other examples involving nearby countries sharing
> abbreviations, e.g., Iraq sharing "AST" with Saudi Arabia, even though
> Iraq is not in Arabia.

Are you considering the "situation on the ground" rule political? I 
think AST (a.k.a Arabia Standard Time) in its both full and abbreviated 
forms is used to denote time in Iraq  both locally and internationally 
and it was not the TZ database who first introduced this tradition.

Here are several completely apolitical reasons to back my line of thought:

1. I think there is a wide agreement that "Minsk time" and "Moscow time" 
are not the same terms and both are used separately to denote time in 
their respective countries (or regions);

2. According to (1) and due to the lack of historical or common 
abbreviation for "Minsk time" community should have picked the 
abbreviation as per standard procedure which would have suggested MINT 
or BYT (and absolutely not MSK) as it was mentioned before;

3. I've brought up  an example of Kazakhstan which while being in the 
same situation as Belarus was, have preserved its own time zone 
abbreviations and haven't had it replaced.


I think the argument that Europe/Minsk was using MSK several decades ago 
is somewhat far-fetched as it was really using "Moscow time" and not the 
"Minsk time". And I'm really hoping that its usage here is truly not 
biased and is not just to cement previously made questionable decision 
which wouldn't have been taken in a first place if the community was 
aware of all the facts involved.


--
Dzmitry Kazimirchyk


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