[tz] On merging timezones - a radical proposal.
Guy Harris
guy at alum.mit.edu
Thu May 23 01:45:20 UTC 2013
On May 22, 2013, at 5:47 PM, John Hawkinson <jhawk at mit.edu> wrote:
> Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote on Wed, 22 May 2013
> at 17:43:42 -0700 in <3DBE1853-4746-467A-8BC5-6040546C1226 at alum.mit.edu>:
>
>> I, on the other hand, think users should, in the best of
>> circumstances, not be presented with anything at all, and have the
>> system automatically pick the right zone and, in circumstances where
>> that's not possible, the user should be presented with a map that
>> lets them pick a location, and users should never have to see a TZ
>> identifier.
>
> "That's nice," but we're not there yet.
Well, maybe you're not, but I am. :-) Hopefully people designing time zone selectors for at least *some* desktop environments have looked at at least *one* OS X machine....
> I still regularly type
>
> TZ=Asia/Calcutta date
>
> to determine the time in Bangalore, India, before sending email to
> folks there.
So do I, but I don't consider it the tz database folks' responsibility not to confuse or upset me by choosing the "wrong" city or....
I view zone names the way I view LANG settings - cryptic strings designed by nerds for nerds and software, not stuff the average user should expect to be straightforward.
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