[tz] Asia/Tomsk

[Victor Sudakov]

Paul Eggert wrote:

[dd]

> > 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.

Dear Paul,

I did not know about this trend, but now that I know, it saddens me.

For example, in FreeBSD's tzsetup(8) in the interactive mode, the
numeric abbreviation looks unsightly, though probably harmless.

> 
> 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.

-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
sip:sudakov at sibptus.tomsk.ru