On Feb 15, 2016, at 2:11 PM, Derick Rethans <tz@derickrethans.nl> wrote:
My main concern with stopping to use only upper case ASCII letters is that is going to break many implementations. Is it really worth the risk of deviating from this unwritten rule? Data stability is important, please do not take the decision of moving away from the defacto standard of upper case ASCII letters lightly. lightly.
I suggest we have a program that grabs the PID and the time, seeds a random number generator from them, and randomly generates time zone abbreviations and checks them against all the existing abbreviations in the tzdb; as soon as it finds one that isn't already in the tzdb, it prints it. Use that to generate abbreviations for all new zones. And, yes, I am at least half serious, if not more. Expecting the tzdb maintainers to pick abbreviations for regions from which I suspect most of us don't come, and speaking languages that I suspect most of us don't speak, and have them be somehow appropriate is probably unwise.