Time zone abbreviations missing for multiple time zones after update to timezone-2017a or later

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 3 (SLES 11 SP3)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 4 (SLES 11 SP4)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (SLES 12)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 1 (SLES 12 SP1)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 2 (SLES 12 SP2)

Situation

Several time zones that used to be represented by an abbreviation are now represented by an offset to UTC, for example:

$ TZ="Asia/Singapore" date
Thu Sep 27 21:02:16 +08 2018
$

this was formerly:

$ TZ="Asia/Singapore" date
Thu Sep 27 21:02:16 SGT 2018
$

Resolution

Cause

To avoid conflicts between informal and newly introduced official abbreviations, the IANA timezone data maintainers removed all time zone abbreviations that are not backed by laws or governmental and standardization bodies, starting with the 2017a release of tz code and data. This is documented in the release notes of the 2017a IANA tz code and data release.

Additional Information

Disclaimer

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