Remember that for all of these cases (and even for those in Russia as a whole), the updates to the tz database have been codified as a switch to a new standard time zone with no DST, rather than as keeping the old time zone with permanent DST.  (Indeed, it seems from a cursory review that the wordings of the relevant bits of legislation are also better reflected by this idiom.)

The notion of perpetually calling this "summer time" (as EEST) or "forward time" (as EEFT) is silly, since it's observed as the same standard year-round.  If one were to ask a reasonably knowledgeable person on the street for their current time and time zone, I doubt they'd qualify it with "but we're on DST now and the whole year" or similar phrasing.  Even if they did so in the short term, if you asked them again after the change has been in place for a couple of years, such qualifiers would seem even more preposterous.  The time is simply "the time."  (Of course, if common usage controverts this reasonable assumption, we should obviously go with that instead.  But it's been six months in the case of Russia and no such usage has been brought to this list's attention.)

Since this year-round standard is effectively a new standard, a new nomenclature is indeed necessary as a new zone has been created.  While the reasoning presented for "FET" is perhaps weak, and it may not be the most reasonable answer, it's important to keep in mind that it solves the problem in a manner that is not unreasonable.

UTC+3 was not a standard offset within Europe prior to this change; now it is.  Since this isn't a change to an existing zone, we're not really concerned with the "suffix": "-ET" for "European Time" remains appropriate since it's consistent with the other standard European zones.  The question lies in the "prefix": Having seen nothing better, "F-" can do for now.

I admit I'm not thrilled with "FET", but I wholeheartedly support it as the most reasonable and thought-out proposal thusfar.

--
Tim Parenti



On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 12:50, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 09/23/11 05:52, Tobias Conradi wrote:
> If calling it permanent summer time in the side note is the issue

It's more than that.  It's that the whole notion of "forward
time" is questionable.  There's no need for a new notion that
means "This location is one hour ahead of where it used to be,
and this is a permanent change."  All one needs to say is
"This location has changed time zones."

Changing time zones is not that unusual.  It happens reasonably
often, and we've dealt with it before.