[tz] Asia/Tomsk

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/25/2016 07:35 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> 1. zic warns that 'warning: time zone abbreviation differs from POSIX standard (+06)'

That warning is incorrect nowadays, as POSIX allows numeric time zone 
abbreviations like '+06'. Older versions of zic generate a warning for 
numeric abbreviations because POSIX.1-1988 did not specify support for 
them. However, POSIX.1-2001 added them, and zic 2015f (and later) uses 
the 2001 POSIX rules and so does not issue that warning.

> 2. Such an abbreviation is not user friendly and even borders on
> offensive. A locality deserves a name!

The trend is more in the other direction, as we are planning to convert 
more zones to use numeric offsets instead of using English-language 
abbreviations that are merely our invention. The idea is that the tz 
database should reflect common practice, not impose it. We started this 
with new zones like Asia/Tomsk in order to check for problems due to 
backward compatibility with pre-2001 software. So far, these problems 
have not materialized, so we have continued this with longstanding zones 
like Asia/Almaty. More work remains to be done, of course.

It has been suggested that we discard invented abbreviations all at once 
rather than a few at a time. This would take a burst of effort, though.