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

[Guy Harris]

On Feb 15, 2016, at 2:11 PM, Derick Rethans <tz at derickrethans.nl> wrote:

> My main concern with stopping to use only upper case ASCII letters is 
> that is going to break many implementations. Is it really worth the risk 
> of deviating from this unwritten rule? Data stability is important, 
> please do not take the decision of moving away from the defacto standard 
> of upper case ASCII letters lightly. lightly.

I suggest we have a program that grabs the PID and the time, seeds a random number generator from them, and randomly generates time zone abbreviations and checks them against all the existing abbreviations in the tzdb; as soon as it finds one that isn't already in the tzdb, it prints it.

Use that to generate abbreviations for all new zones.

And, yes, I am at least half serious, if not more.  Expecting the tzdb maintainers to pick abbreviations for regions  from which I suspect most of us don't come, and speaking languages that I suspect most of us don't speak, and have them be somehow appropriate is probably unwise.