Secondly, I said the "vast majority". Some of the abbreviations are quite familiar, at least for those familiar with the timezones in question, because they match what is in common use. People living in the US, or English speakers outside that have a lot to do with the US would recognize "CST". Tell a Japanese "I'll send the message at 12:30 AMST" and see what he or she understands. In CLDR we ended up dropping almost all abbreviations, because people (whether familiar with the timezones in question or not) didn't recognize them. It's not as if the TZDB is using the wrong abbreviation (at least for English), it's most often that there just isn't an accepted abbreviation in a given language for a particular timezone.

— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 11:26 AM, David Patte <dpatte@relativedata.com> wrote:

On the contrary, I think people are far more familiar with their timezone abbreviations that they are with the olson timezone region names.

On 2012-06-06 13:36, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
I think it is a waste of time to worry about the timezone abbreviations in the tzdatabase.

Despite being around for years, the vast majority of the ones that are in the files are not familiar to people in the timezones in question, and are thus essentially useless. Moreover, they are only in a single language (English) and script (Latin). Time spend on talking about them would be far better spent doing something productive.
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