From: "Olson, Arthur David (NCI)" <olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov> Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 18:27:19 -0400
A possibility would be to add lines such as Zone Australia/CST 9:30 Aus CST Zone Australia/ACST 9:30 Aus ACST Zone Australia/CXT 9:30 Aus CST/CDT Zone Australia/ACXT 9:30 Aus ACST/ACDT to the "australasia" file; this would let folks who wanted specific abbreviations to get them.
I can see two arguments against this approach: * It won't work in general, as you'll need separate Zones for each Australian state, even states that all use "CST", as the states often have differing rules for the DST transitions. * It opens the floodgates to everyone else who wants alternative abbreviations for a region (e.g. the French Canadians). Here's another possibility: add a TZ extension that would let users substitute their own abbreviations. E.g. one might write something like TZ='Australia/Sydney:AEST/AEDT' if one prefers AEST/AEDT. This would also support non-English locales (e.g. the French Canadians). There is the problem of specifying abbreviations for offsets other than latest standard- and daylight-saving-time, but I suppose we could specify a more-general syntax that would attack that problem too.