If I have followed what you're saying, shouldn't the tzdata make sure to use abbreviations that are already current, where these exist, rather than inventing new ones? Speaking as an application designer, it's a real shame one can't work out the 'actual' timezone (as opposed to the current UTC offset) from the output of formatted time strings, but I suppose there's not a lot we can do about that now. Tim On 13 May 2009, at 16:25, Robert Elz wrote:
As you noted, the abbreviations themselves are essentially useless, and applications using them for any more than decoration are generally broken, but what applications decide to do is outside our control. A TZ abbreviation has been available from libc essentially forever, and we need to keep on providing one.
kre