[tz] Swiss time selectable for Germany

[Benjamin Drung]

On Sat, 2023-01-07 at 13:30 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 2023-01-07 01:53, Benjamin Drung via tz wrote:
> > Thanks. Could you add " (Germany)" to Büsingen? It is too small to be
> > commonly known in Germany.
> 
> I looked into how that string is used, came up with what I hope is a 
> better idea, tested it, and fixed another glitch or two that I found.
> 
> The idea is that zone1970.tab's comment column should cover only 
> countries that have multiple timezones, so that it needn't worry about 
> summarizing all the other countries (which don't need the summary anyway).
> 
> I installed the attached patches to implement this. With it, if you run 
> tzselect and choose Germany, you see:
> 
>    Please select one of the following timezones.
>    1) Büsingen enclave
>    2) Germany (most areas)
> 
> which I hope is good enough in the context where you've already picked 
> Germany. It's OK when someone who runs tzselect doesn't know about 
> Büsingen, as they should just shrug and pick the "most areas" line.
> 
> Patch 1 implements this change.

Thanks. This improves the timezone selection and I am happy about the
result. The updated description of the comments column is clear enough
to understand the purpose.

The "present if and only if" could be checked by some tool.

> Patch 3 improves tzselect so that it takes advantage of the Patch 1 
> change. This change improves behavior both with older and bleeding-edge 
> tzdata. Older tzselects will still work, though their 
> (already-confusing) messages will be perhaps a bit more confusing in 
> some cases. I hope this tzselect improvement migrates into Ubuntu soon.

tzselect is shipped by the libc-bin binary package which comes from the
glibc source package. I do not know and haven't investigated how
tzselect migrates to the glibc source package (is this Debian/Ubuntu
specific or does glibc upstream include it?).

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer