[tz] Idea for internationalized time point unique time zone abbreviations

[Petr Machata]

Ian Abbott <abbotti at mev.co.uk> writes:

> On 2012/06/07 05:53 PM, Petr Machata wrote:
>> gettext might be kinda sorta used for translating abbreviations as well.
>> One would need to mangle the abbreviation, e.g. "Europe/Prague//CET", to
>> construct a unique string, which is admittedly quite awkward.  (Also,
>> glibc wouldn't know to do it when formatting localized date strings.)
>> Then you could shove this to gettext and get back "SEČ" as you expect.
>> Scripts could be written to sort the abbreviations into pools of
>> equality, so that "Europe/Prague//CET" doesn't have to be translated
>> separately from "Europe/Bratislava//CET" etc.
>
> But it would have to get the "Europe/Prague//" bit from somewhere in
> order to construct this string.  TZ might not be set or might not be a
> tzdata zone name.  The current zone may be set from the /etc/localtime
> file or wherever.  There's nothing in the contents of a compiled zone
> file to give you the actual tzdata zone name that it originated from.

Ah, true.  I was still thinking about the system-config-date use case,
where this information is at hand.

Thanks,
PM