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

[Arthur David Olson]

> The tzdata time zone abbreviations are proleptic.

As a general rule, yes. There are a few attempts to capture the history of
time zone names; in the US take, for example, Eastern War Time and Eastern
Peace Time (please).

    --ado

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 4:26 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>
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