On 06/02/2016 07:50 AM, Steve Allen wrote:
It would be ironic if it turns out that tzdata abandons these abbreviations and then the popular demand lobbying moves to the Unicode Consortium who might then re-instate them.
The Unicode Consortium is welcome to maintain them, just as they're welcome to maintain other information like the nominative vs the genitive case of Russian month names (a real bug with tzcode 'strftime' in Russian locales, by the way -- any volunteers to fix that? :-). The Consortium has the resources to deal with this sort of thing. We don't. Another reason for not using these abbreviations, which I haven't perhaps made clear, is to avoid arbitrating disputes over what the time zone abbreviations should be. A user could reasonably complain "Why are you making up an abbreviation that calls it Krasnoyarsk Time? This is Tomsk, not Krasnoyarsk!" The current kerfuffle is just the tip of the iceberg, and the problem will get worse as the number of tzdata names increases. These abbreviations are entirely invented and are not needed to solve time zone issues. All too often disagreements about them degenerate into political disputes that distract from tzdata's main goal, and we need to get out of the business of making them up or trying to defend them.