[tz] [PATCH] Change abbreviation of Sri Lanka standard time to SLST

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/19/2016 03:40 AM, Karel Volný wrote:
>
> the problem is, as far as _other_ people are concerned, they find the 
> classical abbreviations useful
>

Not many people object to truly classical abbreviations like GMT and 
EST; it's our inventions like LKT that are more problematic.

> I believe vitually everyone in Russia able to read Latin could 
> understand what YAKT means

Hmm, well, I just now did a Google search for "YAKT site:ru" and the 
first match was for a Russian-language description of Yakt, Montana (and 
I've visited near Yakt and it's beautiful country - but it's not 
Yakutsk). None of the first ten matches were about Yakutsk time. With 
more-specialized searches one can find instances of "YAKT" to mean 
Yakutsk time, largely because of the tzdata invention in earlier 
releases. But it's more common for English-language sources to call it 
"Yakutsk time" with no abbreviation; or when abbreviations are used, to 
say something like "UTC+9" or "MSK+6".

> it is very bad that the change was done in a way that it applies even 
> for older timestamps

The tzdata time zone abbreviations are proleptic. That is, they are the 
English-language abbreviations we use *now* for old time stamps, and 
these abbreviations may differ from abbreviations used back then (often 
because hardly anybody used abbreviations back then). It might be nice 
to also support contemporaneous abbreviations, or abbreviations based on 
tzdata release number, but that would be a harder task and I will be 
happy to let some other project take it on if there is interest.