[tz] 'Australia/Canberra' time zone?

[Guy Harris]

On Nov 23, 2019, at 11:03 AM, Paul Gilmartin via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On 2019-11-23, at 11:35:43, Guy Harris wrote:
>> 
>> User interfaces for selecting a time zone should not rely on the set of tzdb IDs being a comprehensive list of cities.
>> 
> Is there an accessible gazetteer, imagemap, or latitude-longitude
> converter useful for this purpose?

See

	https://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#timezone

although they are rate-limited.  I think Ubuntu may do a bulk download of the database and use it for their own server, used for the Ubuntu time-zone-selection mechanism.

> My phone does it on request
> for a built-in set of cities (e.g. Melbourne but not Alice Springs),
> but it won't display the zoneinfo path.

My phone uses the result it gets from Location Services and turns it into a tzdb ID internally.  So does my Mac, and the way I display the zone info path is

	$ ls -ld /etc/localtime
	lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  45 Oct  4 03:47 /etc/localtime -> /var/db/timezone/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles

(your mileage may vary on macOS Catalina if that's on a read-only file system).

I don't know whether Apple have their own image maps.  This project:

	https://github.com/evansiroky/timezone-boundary-builder

is "A tool to extract data from Open Street Map (OSM) to build the boundaries of the world's timezones."  I don't know what geonames.org uses - it may use somebody's shapefiles or it may rely on people associating tzdb IDs with locations.