[tz] IANA timezone database - request to add Omaha, Nebraska

[Guy Harris]

On Jul 21, 2022, at 10:06 AM, Bob Wilmes via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> I am so sorry to hear that forever my time
> in the Ubuntu time zone map will be tied to Chicago. That’s very disappointing news.

That's Ubuntu's failure, not ours.

Or, should I say, "failures", plural:

When installing Ubuntu 22.04 on a new VM (which I'm doing, for the Nth time, due to *other* failures - thanks, GNOME!), the time zone selector in the installer allowed me to select "Omaha" and offered several Omahas from which to choose.  (It also allowed me to select the city in which I live, which has less than 1/10th the population of Omaha, Nebraska, although it's much larger than Omaha, Illinois.  To be fair, said city *is* a significant city in the San Francisco Bay Area....)

However, once the city was selected, the "Date & Time" setting appears to have forgotten the city I chose; it reports Los Angeles, instead.  Strike 1.

Furthermore, it doesn't understand all the cities that the installer's time zone selector does; I couldn't select my city, just Los Angeles, and couldn't select Omaha either.  Strike 2.

macOS does *not* have these problems.  Its time zone selector in System Preferences knows Omaha, as well as the city I'm in, and, if I select the city I'm in, it *remembers* that and displays that as the "closest city" setting.  *That's* what Ubuntu should be doing, and, if it did that, you won't see "America/Chicago" unless you look at environment variable settings.

And there's nothing particularly special about Omaha; if the time zone database took on the task of supporting names for a significant set of cities, rather than one city per tzdb region, there's a city of around 21 million people that is not in the tzdb - its zone is Asia/Shanghai (the population of which is larger than Beijing).  And, yes, there has been at least one complaint to the list that there's no Asia/Beijing; we did not add it.