[tz] Belarus is listed in MSK timezone
Dzmitry Kazimirchyk
dkazimirchyk at gmail.com
Mon Apr 6 23:11:52 UTC 2015
On 04/05/2015 12:32 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>
> Here's an example of what these thought processes produced: since 1998
> in the tz database the abbreviation MMT has stood for both "Minsk Mean
> Time" (in use 1924-1930) and "Moscow Mean Time" (1916-1918). The
> analogy to MSK should be obvious.
Not quite, MMT actually looks like natural abbreviation for both terms
(produced by taking first letter of each word) unlike MSK which
following this logic doesn't really look natural for neither of "Minsk
time", "Moscow time", but is directly transliterated from traditional
Russian abbreviation for "Moscow time" and is historically associated
with it. To go further, MSK doesn't seem to be analogous to PST and AST
examples mentioned earlier since it isn't natural abbreviation like they
are (but rather an abbreviation used "on the ground" to denote "Moscow
time" and adopted by TZ database for the exact same purpose), hence the
logic behind using it for "Minsk time" on this basis doesn't seem to be
entirely applicable. Natural abbreviation for both terms would be
something like MST which would be neutral and entirely acceptable to
denote both of them, but MSK in my opinion is just not something falling
into that category.
Furthermore, TZ database doesn't seem to store full time zone names
associated with abbreviations it uses. So I guess the consumers of TZ
database data are making these associations themselves using some other
sources available to them. Which with current MSK situation is already
resulting in certain misconceptions like for example here:
http://localtimes.info/Europe/Belarus/Minsk/
--
Dzmitry Kazimirchyk
More information about the tz
mailing list