On 16 February 2016 at 02:25, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

I really doubt whether they'll think they're on Samara time. Samara is roughly a 17-hour nonstop drive north. That would be like people in San Diego thinking that they're on Portland time.

That's not a particular obstacle; we already use SAMT for the Udmurt Republic as well, and Samara is an 8-hour drive south of its largest city, Izhevsk. The two areas aren't contiguous as it is; adding a third would not seem to be a concern.

On 16 February 2016 at 11:37, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

I would like to remove all invented abbreviations from the database in due course, not just the invented Russian abbreviations.

I agree with the general sentiment I've seen here a few times that, e.g., "UTC+0400" is preferable to "+0400" which is preferable to "+04"; the latter are wholly redundant with the "%z" and "%:::z" format strings offered by date, so I see no good reason to manually encode that data a second time as strings.

If we want to "get out of the abbreviation business," I think that's an argument for improving our toolchain accordingly, rather than shoving this into the legacy system. Insofar as SAMT is already a perfectly good (albeit invented) abbreviation for this purpose, perhaps this is a transition which should be planned out more and rolled-out together across a wider set of zones once our toolchain can support it.

--
Tim Parenti