[tz] On merging timezones - a radical proposal.

[Guy Harris]

On May 22, 2013, at 5:47 PM, John Hawkinson <jhawk at mit.edu> wrote:

> Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote on Wed, 22 May 2013
> at 17:43:42 -0700 in <3DBE1853-4746-467A-8BC5-6040546C1226 at alum.mit.edu>:
> 
>> I, on the other hand, think users should, in the best of
>> circumstances, not be presented with anything at all, and have the
>> system automatically pick the right zone and, in circumstances where
>> that's not possible, the user should be presented with a map that
>> lets them pick a location, and users should never have to see a TZ
>> identifier.
> 
> "That's nice," but we're not there yet.

Well, maybe you're not, but I am. :-)  Hopefully people designing time zone selectors for at least *some* desktop environments have looked at at least *one* OS X machine....

> I still regularly type
> 
>  TZ=Asia/Calcutta date
> 
> to determine the time in Bangalore, India, before sending email to
> folks there.

So do I, but I don't consider it the tz database folks' responsibility not to confuse or upset me by choosing the "wrong" city or....

I view zone names the way I view LANG settings - cryptic strings designed by nerds for nerds and software, not stuff the average user should expect to be straightforward.