Timezone translations

Garrett Wollman wollman at csail.mit.edu
Sun Jun 5 01:54:57 UTC 2005


<<On Sat, 4 Jun 2005 20:33:12 -0400, "Gwillim Law" <RLAW at nc.rr.com> said:

> Another is to provide unique, unambiguous time zone names like
> "Eastern Time - New York", "Eastern Time - Indianapolis", etc. as
> alternatives to the ambiguous names.

Indeed, the description file included with the tz database does
exactly that.  In FreeBSD we provide a CUI timezone selector interface
called "tzsetup" that is used for configuring the system's default
timezone, which generates its user interface dynamically from
/usr/share/misc/iso3166 and /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab; if we wanted
to localize this application (there has been no demand thus far), we
would probably do so by localizing these two data files.

(I think this is somewhat orthogonal to the localization of timezone
abbreviations, which only exist in a few locales to begin with.
Indeed, I would argue that it is nearly always an error to localize
abbreviations for zones other than those used in that locale.)

-GAWollman




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