Hi,
And, yes, I am at least half serious, if not more. Expecting the tzdb maintainers to pick abbreviations for regions from which I suspect most of us don't come, and speaking languages that I suspect most of us don't speak, and have them be somehow appropriate is probably unwise.
I wouldn't be that pesimistic ... for example, in my country (Czech Republic), "CET" and "CEST" fit pretty well as we do use "středoevropský (letní) čas" which isn't that hard to associate and understand as it translates exactly as "Central European (Summer) Time" if we are aware that Russia is used to "Москва+X", why not go with "MSK+??" (except for breaking backwards compatibility as different names were invented in the past) if we are unaware ... well, I don't see how inventing something that could be understood at least in English, if not for locals, makes the situation any worse than using random string sorry, I'm a bit late to the party, so I may have missed something (links to archives welcome), but I can't understand what problem are we trying to solve now? - the zone name is completely irrelevant to software, it is to help people, and for me (not statistically significant, right? :-)) it is thousands times better to read "CET" or "CEST" than "+01" and "+02" respectively K. -- Karel Volný QE BaseOs/Daemons Team Red Hat Czech, Brno tel. +420 532294274 (RH: +420 532294111 ext. 8262074) xmpp kavol@jabber.cz :: "Never attribute to malice what can :: easily be explained by stupidity."