From: Andrey A. Chernov <ache@nagual.ru> Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 10:25:25 +0400 (MSD) Please, note that all I say is about Moscow time zone only, I don't know situation for other Russian zones abbreviations. Other Russian zones were a mess. For example, the abbreviations for Kuybyshev (UTC+4) were `KSK' and `KSD', which were incorrect. I originally used `KSK' and `KSD' for Kuybyshev because I mistakenly thought that `SK' and `SD' were acronyms for standard and daylight time -- I didn't know that the `SK' was the `SK' in `Moskva'. This needed fixing. I suspect backward capability isn't enough. Under the latest proposed patch, people who prefer `MSK'/`MSD' can use TZ="MSK"; won't this give them the behavior that they're used to? The main problems with your new names is that they comes too late: MSK/MSD already used here approx. 10 years! We recently changed `MET'/`MET DST' to `CET'/`CEST'; even though the former abbreviations had been in use for over 10 years by some computer users, they didn't match real-world usage. I looked hard for commonly-used English abbreviations or names for the Russian time zones. I couldn't find any phrases other than ``Moscow time'', ``Novosibirsk time'', etc. Given the problems we had been starting to see with disputes about which language to use in other locales, I've been trying to stick to a policy that the tz database is in English and needs translations to other languages. An advantage of using the first three letters of the English name for the city is that the resulting abbreviations `MOST', `NOVT', etc. are not likely to be mistaken for common abbreviations like `MST'. By the way, I just took a census of Usenet articles on file at twinsun.com that had Moscow time in their `Date:' line, followed by the time zone abbreviation in a comment. Admittedly this is a small sample, since most Usenet articles don't include the abbreviations, and we subscribe only to technical news articles here. That being said, of 377,986 articles on file, of which 1,175 contained time zone abbreviations in comments, I found only one article that used `MSD'; the other 23 articles from UTC+0400 with time zone abbreviations used the obsolete abbreviation `WSU DST' (which clearly won't do).