On Tue, 2023-05-02 at 13:13 -0400, Tim Parenti wrote:
On Tue, 2 May 2023 at 11:19, Benjamin Drung <benjamin.drung@canonical.com> wrote:
Help on wording will be highly appreciated. Currently debconf will ask "Please select the city or region corresponding to your time zone. Time zone: GMT, GMT+0, GMT+1, ..., GMT-9, Greenwich, UCT, UTC, Universal, Zulu".
Draft: "Please select the offset corresponding to your time zone. Contrary to UTC, positive values to GMT refer to zones west to Greenwich and negative values to east to Greenwich (e.g. UTC-6 = GMT+6). Time zone: GMT, GMT+0, GMT+1, ..., GMT-9, Greenwich, UCT, UTC, Universal, Zulu".
It would be more accurate to say something more along the lines of:
"Contrary to modern conventions, POSIX-compatible zones use positive values to refer to zones west of Greenwich and negative values for those east of Greenwich (e.g., 'Etc/GMT+6' refers to 6 hours west of Greenwich, commonly called 'UTC-6')."
Thanks. I will use this explanation in the debconf prompt. Thanks for all feedback in this thread. Some responses demonstrated that I failed to describe the context. On Debian/Ubuntu systems users normally select their timezones with a location picker. The tzdata package comes with debconf questions to set the timezone. You can see them by running "dpkg-reconfigure tzdata". It will first ask for the area (like Europe, America, Etc). Then it will ask for the country. -- Benjamin Drung Debian & Ubuntu Developer