On Thu, Jun 2, 2016, at 11:02, Jonathan Lennox wrote:
It certainly sounds like the common usage in Russia (and in the Soviet Union back in the day) is to call the timezones МСК−1 through МСК+9, which would be calqued as MSK-1 through MSK+9. This is what I'd recommend for Russian timezones, unless actual Russians disagree.
The objection to this (and to using "UTC+nn" for other timezones) has been that someone or some code might mindlessly copy an output timezone abbreviation into TZ, resulting in (from MSK+2) a timezone which is called "MSK" and has an offset of -02:00. I don't recall if anyone's provided any concrete evidence of such a thing actually happening. [Incidentally, what should these use for daylight saving time? MSD itself isn't as "standard" as MSK, but is well entrenched in the Unix world. Or, not being constrained to three characters, use "MSK[+nn]DST" or "MSKDST[+nn]"?]