[tz] [PATCH] New file time.tab, superseding zone.tab

[Matt Johnson]

Interesting.  As I don't use tzselect directly, I had assumed the comments were there for documentation purposes only.  I didn't realize that they were intended for display to the end-user.

If that’s the case, then why are the comments they English only?  Especially for zones where English is not the primary language?

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert at cs.ucla.edu] 
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2014 3:47 PM
To: Matt Johnson; 'Time zone mailing list'
Subject: Re: [tz] [PATCH] New file time.tab, superseding zone.tab

Matt Johnson wrote:
>   Someone living there would have previously selected Germany, then Busingen.  But now they have to select Germany, then Zurich.

Actually, after selecting Germany tzselect now asks you this:

Please select one of the following time zone regions.
1) Swiss time
2) Berlin time

> people living elsewhere in Germany might get confused as to why Zurich 
> is a choice at all

Without the change, many people in Germany might have gotten confused as to why Busingen is a choice at all, so the change isn't making things worse.  On the contrary, to my mind "Swiss time" is a bit of an improvement, as it makes it clearer what's going on to someone who's not a time zone expert.  Perhaps the wording could be improved further, but the old wording wasn't all that great either.

> Should one infer that the intent here is to reduce the usage of links?

Yes, one of the motivations was to not have to maintain seemingly-separate entries for what are really aliases.  The new file time.tab doesn't have any links; this should have been checked by "make check_tables" but I see there was a typo in its implementation, so I installed the attached patch into the experimental version to fix that.