On 25/05/2016 15:35, Victor Sudakov wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
As a citizen of Tomsk, I would like to raise some questions concerning the recent addition of the Asia/Tomsk timezone. As you know, this time zone's abbreviation is all numeric:
Zone Asia/Tomsk 5:39:51 - LMT 1919 Dec 22 6:00 - +06 1930 Jun 21 7:00 Russia +07/+08 1991 Mar 31 2:00s 6:00 Russia +06/+07 1992 Jan 19 2:00s 7:00 Russia +07/+08 2002 May 1 3:00 6:00 Russia +06/+07 2011 Mar 27 2:00s 7:00 - +07 2014 Oct 26 2:00s 6:00 - +06 2016 May 29 2:00s 7:00 - +07
In my opinion, it is bad for two reasons:
1. zic warns that 'warning: time zone abbreviation differs from POSIX standard (+06)'
Recent enough versions of zic don't issue that warning. If you wanted to put such an abbreviation in a POSIX-style TZ environment variable value, it would need to be placed in angle brackets like this: TZ='<+07>-7' (which, admittedly, looks a little odd, but that's the fault of UNIX tradition).
2. Such an abbreviation is not user friendly and even borders on offensive. A locality deserves a name!
On the positive side, at least it lets the user know how far the time zone is from UTC! -- -=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk> )=- -=( Web: http://www.mev.co.uk/ )=-