I see this approach as violently discriminatory. Although Belarus did formally declared independence in 1990 it took time to implement it and real independence was achieved only in December 1991 with disolvation of the Soviet Union. MSK used on the territory of current Belarus back then always meant "Moscow time" and there was no real concept or name such as "Minsk time" back then, so the "conservative" approach doesn't really apply here. -- Dzmitry Kazimirchyk On 4/2/15 2:07 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 04/01/2015 01:09 PM, Tim Parenti wrote:
I cannot think of another case where we have applied the designation of a neighboring country to a region that has not itself changed its timekeeping rules.
The situation here is not unprecedented. The tz database used MSK/MSD for Europe/Minsk at UTC+3/4 even after Belarus's independence from the Soviet Union in July 1990. And this continued a longstanding practice of using MSK/MSD to denote Minsk time at UTC+3/4, going all the way back to 1930. The conservative approach here is to continue to use the same abbreviation.