Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu> wrote on Wed, 22 May 2013 at 17:43:42 -0700 in <3DBE1853-4746-467A-8BC5-6040546C1226@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. And some consumers of the database will never have graphical interfaces. And I don't forsee a good solution to ancillary uses of tz identifiers for doing computation and determining "what time is it over there"? I still regularly type TZ=Asia/Calcutta date to determine the time in Bangalore, India, before sending email to folks there. And I even have graphical tools that show me some such times, but they're not always sufficient. --jhawk@mit.edu John Hawkinson