I'm not completely convinced by the technical part of your argument. However, since you're the person on the spot, I guess we should follow your advice and use `MSK'/`MSD'. I'll draft a revised patch along these lines. It would help if you could send me your recollection of where these abbreviations came from; I can put them in as comments. For example, you wrote that MSK and MSD have been used for 10 years or more, but they've been in the tz database only for 3 years or so; where were they used before that? From: Andrey A. Chernov <ache@nagual.ru> Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 14:23:10 +0400 (MSD)
I just took a census of Usenet articles on file at twinsun.com that had Moscow time in their `Date:' line, followed by
Usenet RFC 1036 _not_ allows usage of timezone abbreviations except few standard North American timezones The `Date:' lines that I was talking about all had the time zone abbreviations as comments in parentheses, e.g.: Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 02:25:38 +0400 (WSU DST) This is allowed by RFC 822 and is recommended by son-of-RFC-1036 (see <URL:ftp://ftp.zoo.toronto.edu/pub/news.txt.Z>). I looked into those WSU DST dates some more and found that they all came from glas.apc.org (e.g. <URL:news:APC&63'0'1dd99a0b'd25@glas.apc.org>); perhaps it's an old gateway. I noticed also, by the way, that `MST' was used for `Moscow summer time' in some English-language reports of preliminary returns in the Russian presidential election; e.g. see <URL:news:APC&63'0'4e79b8c1'8b4@glas.apc.org> (1996-06-17), which you can find by visiting <URL:http://dejanews.com/forms/dnq.html> and searching for `"Moscow summer time" MST' in the Old Usenet database.