On 05/25/2016 07:35 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:
1. zic warns that 'warning: time zone abbreviation differs from POSIX standard (+06)'
That warning is incorrect nowadays, as POSIX allows numeric time zone abbreviations like '+06'. Older versions of zic generate a warning for numeric abbreviations because POSIX.1-1988 did not specify support for them. However, POSIX.1-2001 added them, and zic 2015f (and later) uses the 2001 POSIX rules and so does not issue that warning.
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. 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.