----Origineel Bericht---- Van : guy@alum.mit.edu Datum : 26/05/2016 11:08 Aan : vas@mpeks.tomsk.su Cc : tz@iana.org Onderwerp : Re: [tz] Asia/Tomsk
On May 25, 2016, at 10:19 AM, Victor Sudakov <vas@mpeks.tomsk.su> wrote:
As a member of the public, I don't like the idea of the tz project calling my time zone <+07> :-)
As a member of the tzdb project (albeit one whose main effort was ages ago), I don't like the idea of expecting people not necessarily from the locale of a tzdb zone to pick abbreviations for times in the zone and then deal with complaints from people from that locale. :-)
My reply: Look at the law: the official time zone name for Tomsk is: 6-я часовая зона (If utf-8 is working, then you'll see Russian in Cyrillic letters.) The English translation is: 6th hourly zone (6th timezone). Cheerio! Oscar van Vlijmen
vanadovv@hetnet.nl wrote:
As a member of the public, I don't like the idea of the tz project calling my time zone <+07> :-)
As a member of the tzdb project (albeit one whose main effort was ages ago), I don't like the idea of expecting people not necessarily from the locale of a tzdb zone to pick abbreviations for times in the zone and then deal with complaints from people from that locale. :-)
My reply:
Look at the law: the official time zone name for Tomsk is: 6-я часовая зона (If utf-8 is working, then you'll see Russian in Cyrillic letters.) The English translation is: 6th hourly zone (6th timezone).
This same law "107-ФЗ Об исчислении времени" also provides an official alias "МСК+4" for this timezone. But we cannot use non-ascii characters for time zone names in tzdata, can we? -- Victor Sudakov, VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN sip:sudakov@sibptus.tomsk.ru
On Thu, May 26, 2016, at 07:18, Victor Sudakov wrote:
Look at the law: the official time zone name for Tomsk is: 6-я часовая зона (If utf-8 is working, then you'll see Russian in Cyrillic letters.) The English translation is: 6th hourly zone (6th timezone).
This same law "107-ФЗ Об исчислении времени" also provides an official alias "МСК+4" for this timezone. But we cannot use non-ascii characters for time zone names in tzdata, can we?
If "МСК+#"-style abbreviations were *official*, I think that should be enough justification to use "MSK+#"-style ascii abbreviations. However, the context they appear in in the law seems informational to me; it's in the same parentheses as UTC+#. Oddly enough, nothing in the C or POSIX/Unix standards *actually* says anything about time zone names (which are consistently referred to as names, not abbreviations) being abbreviated. It's merely inferred from historical practice, along with the fact that in POSIX in the TZ variable they (obnoxiously, for no stated reason) cannot contain spaces. This prohibition does *not* extend to what may appear in tzname if TZ is in the :tzid format. Incidentally, MSVC's time functions on Windows use fully spelled out names.
Wouldn't MCK+4 be interpreted by a POSIX TZ variable as 4 hours behind UTC? That seems like it would be quite confusing, especially since it's just a numerical reference to a different zone (i.e. I don't see how it's any better than naming the zone by its offset, in the absence of a proper local practice). On May 26, 2016 9:44:22 AM EDT, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 26, 2016, at 07:18, Victor Sudakov wrote:
Look at the law: the official time zone name for Tomsk is: 6-я часовая зона (If utf-8 is working, then you'll see Russian in Cyrillic letters.) The English translation is: 6th hourly zone (6th timezone).
This same law "107-ФЗ Об исчислении времени" also provides an official alias "МСК+4" for this timezone. But we cannot use non-ascii characters for time zone names in tzdata, can we?
If "МСК+#"-style abbreviations were *official*, I think that should be enough justification to use "MSK+#"-style ascii abbreviations. However, the context they appear in in the law seems informational to me; it's in the same parentheses as UTC+#.
Oddly enough, nothing in the C or POSIX/Unix standards *actually* says anything about time zone names (which are consistently referred to as names, not abbreviations) being abbreviated. It's merely inferred from historical practice, along with the fact that in POSIX in the TZ variable they (obnoxiously, for no stated reason) cannot contain spaces. This prohibition does *not* extend to what may appear in tzname if TZ is in the :tzid format.
Incidentally, MSVC's time functions on Windows use fully spelled out names.
On Thu, May 26, 2016, at 10:33, Paul G wrote:
Wouldn't MCK+4 be interpreted by a POSIX TZ variable as 4 hours behind UTC?
Why is someone going to paste the abbreviation into the TZ variable? There are very few timezones for which that would yield a useful result.
Well, I'm just thinking that if you output a timestamp that looks like: 2015-09-03 14:33:04 MCK+4 Then later try to parse it back, your software might interpret MCK+4 as a POSIX string (I know that python-dateutil would), since it's formatted like one. On May 26, 2016 10:56:02 AM EDT, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 26, 2016, at 10:33, Paul G wrote:
Wouldn't MCK+4 be interpreted by a POSIX TZ variable as 4 hours behind UTC?
Why is someone going to paste the abbreviation into the TZ variable? There are very few timezones for which that would yield a useful result.
participants (4)
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Paul G -
Random832 -
vanadovv＠hetnet.nl -
Victor Sudakov