Dzmitry Kazimirchyk wrote:
I would agree with one rule set - one name policy if it was strictly observed by the TZ database.
That would require inventing names for time zones, and we try to avoid doing that when possible. The goal is to describe timekeeping practice, not to prescribe it. In hindsight the tz database could have supported having no abbreviation for zones where abbreviations are not commonly used, and this would have avoided some similar problems elsewhere where we use "zzz" for time zone abbreviations in some cases; but this would have entailed some confusion and/or compatibility hassles at the time the database was being introduced and it's impractical to revisit this design decision now. The situation with MSK is not unprecedented. For example, in the tz database PST stands for "Pacific Standard Time" in the United States, and for "Pitcairn Standard Time" in Pitcairn, and corresponds to UTC-8 in both countries. This is entirely analogous to MSK standing for "Moscow time" in Russia and for "Minsk time" in Belarus and corresponding to UTC+3 in both countries. For timekeeping purposes it's often a bit simpler to use the same abbreviation for the same UTC offset even if the abbreviation is ambiguous, and this hasn't been a significant technical problem in practice.