Paul Eggert wrote: [dd]
2. Such an abbreviation is not user friendly and even borders on offensive. A locality deserves a name!
The trend is more in the other direction, as we are planning to convert more zones to use numeric offsets instead of using English-language abbreviations that are merely our invention. The idea is that the tz database should reflect common practice, not impose it. We started this with new zones like Asia/Tomsk in order to check for problems due to backward compatibility with pre-2001 software. So far, these problems have not materialized, so we have continued this with longstanding zones like Asia/Almaty. More work remains to be done, of course.
Dear Paul, I did not know about this trend, but now that I know, it saddens me. For example, in FreeBSD's tzsetup(8) in the interactive mode, the numeric abbreviation looks unsightly, though probably harmless.
It has been suggested that we discard invented abbreviations all at once rather than a few at a time. This would take a burst of effort, though.
-- Victor Sudakov, VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN sip:sudakov@sibptus.tomsk.ru