On 04/05/2015 12:32 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
Here's an example of what these thought processes produced: since 1998 in the tz database the abbreviation MMT has stood for both "Minsk Mean Time" (in use 1924-1930) and "Moscow Mean Time" (1916-1918). The analogy to MSK should be obvious.
Not quite, MMT actually looks like natural abbreviation for both terms (produced by taking first letter of each word) unlike MSK which following this logic doesn't really look natural for neither of "Minsk time", "Moscow time", but is directly transliterated from traditional Russian abbreviation for "Moscow time" and is historically associated with it. To go further, MSK doesn't seem to be analogous to PST and AST examples mentioned earlier since it isn't natural abbreviation like they are (but rather an abbreviation used "on the ground" to denote "Moscow time" and adopted by TZ database for the exact same purpose), hence the logic behind using it for "Minsk time" on this basis doesn't seem to be entirely applicable. Natural abbreviation for both terms would be something like MST which would be neutral and entirely acceptable to denote both of them, but MSK in my opinion is just not something falling into that category. Furthermore, TZ database doesn't seem to store full time zone names associated with abbreviations it uses. So I guess the consumers of TZ database data are making these associations themselves using some other sources available to them. Which with current MSK situation is already resulting in certain misconceptions like for example here: http://localtimes.info/Europe/Belarus/Minsk/ -- Dzmitry Kazimirchyk