[tz] Asia/Tomsk

[Paul G]

Wouldn't MCK+4 be interpreted by a POSIX TZ variable as 4 hours behind UTC? That seems like it would be quite confusing, especially since it's just a numerical reference to a different zone (i.e. I don't see how it's any better than naming the zone by its offset, in the absence of a proper local practice).


On May 26, 2016 9:44:22 AM EDT, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
>On Thu, May 26, 2016, at 07:18, Victor Sudakov wrote:
>> > Look at the law: the official time zone name for Tomsk is: 6-я
>> > часовая зона (If utf-8 is working, then you'll see Russian in
>> > Cyrillic letters.) The English translation is: 6th hourly zone (6th
>> > timezone).
>>
>> This same law "107-ФЗ Об исчислении времени" also provides an
>official
>> alias "МСК+4" for this timezone. But we cannot use non-ascii
>> characters for time zone names in tzdata, can we?
>
>If "МСК+#"-style abbreviations were *official*, I think that should be
>enough justification to use "MSK+#"-style ascii abbreviations. However,
>the context they appear in in the law seems informational to me; it's
>in
>the same parentheses as UTC+#.
>
>Oddly enough, nothing in the C or POSIX/Unix standards *actually* says
>anything about time zone names (which are consistently referred to as
>names, not abbreviations) being abbreviated. It's merely inferred from
>historical practice, along with the fact that in POSIX in the TZ
>variable they (obnoxiously, for no stated reason) cannot contain
>spaces.
>This prohibition does *not* extend to what may appear in tzname if TZ
>is
>in the :tzid format.
>
>Incidentally, MSVC's time functions on Windows use fully spelled
>out names.
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