[tz] Astrakhan region got approval to change its time zone

[Russ Allbery]

Paul Goyette <paul at whooppee.com> writes:
> On Sun, 14 Feb 2016, Paul Eggert wrote:

>> The attached additional patch would change the new zone to use "+0400"
>> rather than "+04". Still, I mildly prefer "+04", as it's briefer. No
>> matter what we switch to, we will confuse some people; and other things
>> being roughly equal, briefer is better.

> Perhaps briefer is better.  But if this is a "trial run" for moving into
> the future, where we can reasonably expect partial hour offsets, we should
> go ahead with the +0400 variant.  At least this way, there'll be only one
> new variant for people to absorb!

> Just my PHP 1 (approx. USD 0.02) worth of opinion!

Yeah, that's my personal leaning as well.  Another useful principle along
the lines of "briefer is better" is "don't invent new notation if one can
avoid it."  Using the existing ISO 8601 time zone notation for the time
zone abbreviation has a lot of merit under that principle.  Anyone
familiar with ISO 8601 or RFC 822 syntax will immediately find it
familiar.

(It's worth noting that +04 is also valid ISO 8601, which weakens this
argument, but my sense is that it's much less common to use the two-digit
form in day-to-day use of ISO 8601, and it's intended to indicate lower
precision.  ISO 8601 allows a lot of abbreviated forms that, in practice,
one usually doesn't use because they just add confusion without serving
much purpose.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>