[tz] RES: RES: Timezone for Brazil

[Guy Harris]

On Oct 10, 2023, at 1:59 PM, Fabrício Rennó <fabricio.renno at sxte.com.br> wrote:

> I think I made my idea clear about the need of a lighter approach.

As Paul indicated, a simpler *IANA database timezone selector* might be useful.  Cutting back on IANA database timezones, however, won't work, for all the reasons indicated.

The *best* timezone selector, from a user's perspective, is *no* timezone selector.  The machine on which I'm typing this has a mechanism (Location Services) that allows it to determine, in many cases, an approximate longitude and latitude (even without access to global positioning satellites or a mobile phone network, neither of which it has), and uses that plus, presumably, a set of maps of the IANA database timezones, to select the appropriate timezone, and switches the system to that timezone as necessary.

(Yes, this means that if I travel from one IANA database timezone to another, the current timezone changes automatically.  For example, if I traveled to Colorado, and then to Arizona, and then back to California, the timezone would change three times.  And, yes, that would even change out from under a program such as

	#include <stdio.h>
	#include <time.h>
	#include <unistd.h>

	int
	main(void)
	{
		time_t now;

		for (;;) {
			now = time(NULL);
			printf("%s", ctime(&now));
			sleep(5);
		}
	}

would shift the time to local time after all three of those travels.)

The second-best, from a user's perspective, is something that lets you indicate the name of a nearby city, from a reasonably large list of cities, or just type in the name of a city, and choose based on that.

Anything that involves selecting from a list of IANA database timezone names is inferior to that.