Paul Eggert wrote:
The zic(8) man page's FILES section <https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/zic.8.html#FILES> says the following:
OK, that is what I was looking for. Happily, zic.8.txt (the whimsically spaced plain-text version of zic.8.html) is in the code distribution, so it is not necessary to hit the Web to get this spec.
Wording about names and abbreviations has been present in the TZDB documentation, in some form or another, since release 2010j. To help avoid further confusion in this matter, I recently installed the following patch to give examples of month names and abbreviations, and this patch should appear in the next release:
https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/96fa7b7dd4cf8bd415a50e0f6a190488fa3c8078
which includes: | Month names may be abbreviated as mentioned previously; | for example, January can appear as | .q January , | .q JANU | or | .q Ja , | but not as | .q j | which would be ambiguous with July. It’s actually more nuanced than that: “j” is also ambiguous with June, so “Ja” would be acceptable whereas “Ju” (same number of letters) would not. I realize this might be construed as overexplaining, which has garnered a very bad name of late, so perhaps what is in the patch is best left as is. -- Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org