> Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed.

Eggert is petitioning the government for a redress of greivances on behalf of more or less the entire computing industry (or whatever portion follows POSIX): to whit, the world has come to agreement that timezone abbreviations must match [-+[:alnum:]]{3,6} and PT does not match that.

Now, BC government could ask every vendor of software that displays a time zone abbreviation to use PT, and then they could individually come back and say, no it needs three letters. And then they could threaten to not buy products that won't say PT and not allow imports of said products... But then the vendors would probably ask if they have control over imports or if that's a federal responsibility (I don't know) and that they're not doing a one off to fix something for BC. But if that's how it's going to be, probably maybe come back with POs in 5 years when POSIX standards have filtered down to allow two character abbreviations. Seems easier to get told it's a problem in one place and hopefully figure out what the answer is once.

>he world has come to agreement

No, it hasn't. I commonly use PT myself which doesn't fit that format. It's the timezone that the west coast of America uses which makes it very convenient if you live there instead of having to remember if the day your meeting on is with or without daylight savings. The three timezones we use here are:

PT: The time of the day that all of our clocks are going to be set to.

PST: The time when daylight savings is not active.

PDT: The time when daylight savings is active.