[tz] Dropping coordinates from zone1970.tab?

Guy Harris gharris at sonic.net
Thu Sep 30 09:14:18 UTC 2021


On Sep 30, 2021, at 1:34 AM, Aurelien Jarno via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> Again the problem is not about automatically selecting the timezone when
> clicking on a random location, but clicking on those cities. Among
> others Antarctica/Syowa or America/Nassau can't be shown anymore on a
> map.

"Antarctica/Syowa" and "Asia/Riyadh" are regions on the map, not points on the map, and if you show a map in which every tzdb region is shown sedately, both of those regions would be shown in a map based on 2021b, because they're the same region, so, if one would be shown, the other would be shown as well.

The same applies to "America/Nassau" and "America/Toronto".

> End users will have to select Ryhad and Toronto

Meaning "end users will have to select the region corresponding to Asia/Riyadh and the region corresponding to America/Toronto".

If a map showing tzdb regions is big enough to show cities, it would show Toronto and Montreal and Ottawa in the America/Toronto region.  It would also show Nassau, although the region probably would be shown as two (or more) separate areas.

Alternatively, on a system that supports graphical user interfaces, you could show a world map that shows the current "time zone" (in the traditional sense, not in the tzdb region sense) and that lets you dig that zone east or west to select a zone - and then lets you click a location within the zone to choose which particular tzdb region you want.  It could also provide a box into which to type the name of a city (*NOT* necessarily a city whose name appears in the name of a Zone or Link in the tzdb!).

To see an example of this, either:

	1) sit in front of a machine running macOS, pop up System Preferences, select "Date & Time", click the padlock if it's locked and enter an appropriate password, and un-check "Set time zone automatically using current location" (so that you can manipulate the map)

or

	2) sit in front of a machine running a sufficiently recent version of Ubuntu with the standard GNOME GUI (18.04 and 20.04 work, for example), click "Activities", enter "time zone", select "Date & Time", turn off "Automatic time zone" if it's on, and click "Time Zone".

There may be others (I have not, for example, checked any recent Ubuntu releases to see what their KDE UI does, nor have I checked any Fedora release).


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