<<On Fri, 12 Jan 2001 16:17:09 +0100, Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca@renault.fr> said:
collect tz datas for all countries, collecting the abbreviations makes less sense, particularly in the countries where only one timezone is in current use.
Indeed, the entire notion of a standard timezone abbreviation makes little or no sense in many countries, and at times the tz database maintainers have had to go to some lengths to invent one appropriate for the location. (I imagine most French-speaking areas outside continental France make little distinction beyond ``heure locale'' and ``heure de New-York'' etc. -- and the English-language initialisms found in the tz database are of little value.) I'm curious, though... I know the tz library and database is in use by several commercial vendors with extensive localization programs (e.g., Sun). Do those vendors make an effort to translate the tz strings as well, so that `EST' and `EDT' in locale fr_CA come out `HNE' and `HAE'? If so, do they do it by providing a completely localized tz database, or a locally-localized one, or by applying some post-processing on the (English) strings in the standard database? -GAWollman