[tz] [PATCH] Revert recent pre-1970 changes.

[Guy Harris]

On Sep 2, 2013, at 11:53 AM, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:

> Guy Harris wrote:
>> This would, ideally, involve showing people country and city*names*  (rather than showing, for example, ISO 3166 country codes), in their own languages, as necessary, and would not involve people ever having to know tzids.
> 
> I'm not quite sure what all this ream of writing was intended to explain?

It was intended to explain that

	1) you don't always have to ask the user for the time zone - that's not a universal characteristic of everything that deals with times, as that information may be made available by other mechanisms;

	2) in those cases where you *do* have to ask the user for the time zone, there are better and worse ways of doing so, and something that relies solely on the list of tzids, or that shows users tzids rather than locations, falls under the category of "worse", and you *can* do better than that (OS X does do better; I'm not sure iOS even lets you set it - as far as I know, it automatically sets the time zone using the value it gets from Core Location and some unspecified database of tzdb zone boundaries).

> Setting the timezone on a local system is not the problem. It's telling some remote system what that is which is currently not happening automatically ...
> Yes with more modern devices we can ask for their current location, if that is enabled, but a large number of devices still don't have this facility, and my tablets don't have GPS so don't reply to a request.

Do your tablets have Wi-Fi?  If so, you might be able to use something such as Skyhook:

	http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/

And *if* your tablets are running some OS that includes location services (iOS and Android both appear to), you might be able to use that and not even have to care how it happens.