[tz] Asia/Tomsk
Paul Eggert
eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Wed May 25 16:47:42 UTC 2016
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.
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