[tz] tzdb timezone names/identifiers and links

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Tue Feb 26 08:41:21 UTC 2019


On Feb 26, 2019, at 12:32 AM, Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de> wrote:

> Tony Finch wrote:
>> Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de> wrote:
>> ... though it seems to map
>> from TZ names to translated exemplar cities, which is slightly different
>> than a direct translation of the TZ name.
> 
> In my original email I tried to distinguish between the TZDB ID name
> (which of course doesn't have to be translated), and the names that are
> actually presented to the user when they select a time zone for their
> system, or add a calendar event with a time for a specific zone. The
> latter should be localized, IMO.

The latter are not supplied by the tzdb, so they can't be localized by the tzdb developers.

For example. there *is* no tzdb ID Europe/Macedonia.  *That* was cooked up by somebody involved in the development of your Linux distribution or somebody, *other* than the tzdb developers, upstream of them.  *They're* the ones who would need to localize the name.

And what they really should be doing is:

	1) ideally, trying to find out where your machine is, and picking the appropriate tzdb ID based on that (as my iPhone and Mac both do, by default - and, yes, they update the tzdb region when you move across zone boundaries, even updating the current tzdb regions for dumb UN*X programs that don't know that the region *can* change out from under them);

	2) if they have no mechanism to find the machine's current coordinates (GPS, geolocation by looking at what known wireless networks are nearby, geolocation by finding the location of the nearest cell tower, etc.), either providing a map where the user can select a location, or by providing the name of the city or other locale they're in (as both the macOS tzdb region selector and the Ubuntu 18.04 tzdb region selector do);

rather than just throwing an arbitrary list of *some* location names at the user.


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