[tz] [PATCH 00/10] Zone Table Comments

[J William Piggott]

On 02/24/2016 04:07 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>J William Piggott wrote:
>> As it turns out, no abbreviations were need to prevent (any further)
>> breaking of 80 columns (the current comments are already broken).
>
>OK, but I'd rather fix the comments rather than leave them broken.

I anticipated push back against such an extensive reduction in content,
so I was going to submit them as a separate patch set.

Establishing a standard format first seemed like the best sequence.

I am glad that you made the changes. It is great for tzselect to have
proper paging now, good job.

> Some of the notation I found confusing (e.g., the ", (" syntax) ...

I wasn't completely satisfied with that either. I was looking for a
terse solution to issues like below; does 'west' apply to
Sulawesi/Celebes, Bali, Nusa Tengarra?  Does 'E' apply to 'AB'? What if
it did (as with Coahuila)? ... and so on.

   Borneo (east, south), Sulawesi/Celebes, Bali, Nusa Tengarra, Timor (west)
   Mountain - AB, BC (E), SK (W)
   Zaporozh'ye/Zaporizhia, Lugansk/Luhansk (east)
   Newfoundland, Labrador (southeast)
   Central Time - Durango; Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas (all far from US)

I find the 'all' solution confusing.

So I tried a different approach in my current submission with the
subject line: [PATCH 09/10] Delimit sub-regions with semicolons

   To remove ambiguity always delimit any sub-region with a
   semicolon, whether it applies to a group of regions or a
   single region.

The perfect solution to resolve the ambiguity is to add more words, but
considering that the zone table comments have length restrictions, I
think the above makes it reasonably clear without adding any additional
characters.

>This version is not 100% consistent, as it uses abbreviations more
>often in menus when the menus would otherwise fail to fit.

I don't see using abbreviations when necessary as being inconsistent. It
just improves readability and aesthetics to favor full spellings
whenever possible.

>Please see the attached patch, which I've installed on the experimental
>github repository.

I think it mostly looks good, this patch set has a few additions.