[tz] Clarification on LMT entries
Paul Eggert
eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Fri Jun 8 19:54:36 UTC 2018
As I recall, tzdb's circa-1880 transitions in the former Russian empire
are from Shanks. I have not found independent verification of these
transitions, and quite possibly they're imaginary. For what it's worth,
the guess recorded in tzdb lists a transition from local mean time to
timekeeping based on clocks of major cities nearby, and this guess uses
KMT to denote "Kiev Mean Time", as noted in the tzdb comment and listed
in <https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#abbreviations>. Of
course we'd like a better source than Shanks for this.
Common practice in 19th-century Russia was to keep Moscow time in train
stations, regardless of local timekeeping practice. So that is another
complexity for Kiev.
Another point: these guesses are proleptic, as they use the Gregorian
calendar and 19-century Russia was firmly in the Julian camp.
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