On Oct 10, 2023, at 3:48 PM, Doug Ewell <doug@ewellic.org> wrote:
Guy Harris wrote:
Most users should never be exposed to the existence of "America/Detroit" or "America/New_York" or "America/Sao_Paolo" or "America/Noronha" or "Asia/Shanghai" or "Europe/Berlin" or....
As I know I said at least twice, the app does not display raw tzids, but instead strings returned by CLDR (actually ICU, and with a UTC base offset prepended as requested by marketing):
(UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (Detroit) (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (New York) (UTC-03:00) Brasilia Standard Time (Sao Paulo) etc.
Users ideally shouldn't be exposed to the tzdb maintainers' choices of LOCATIONs at all. "Los Angeles" isn't much better than "America/Los_Angeles", especially for people not in the LA area. (As far as I know, we haven't gotten complaints about LA vs. San Francisco or LA vs. San Jose or LA vs. San Diego, but we *have* gotten at least one complaint about Asia/Beijing not working, which is why I mentioned Asia/Shanghai.) And, depending on the locale, there might be ways of choosing between different timezones that cover the same time zone, e.g. (UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (most locations) (UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (Arizona) (with whatever tweaks would be most straightforward to include the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Nation) that might be more obvious than (UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (Denver) (UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (Phoenix) ("But I'm in Boulder!" "And I'm in Tempe!" "And *I'm* in Jackson Hole!").
Brasilia “Standard” Time is not ideal, but it’s what ICU gives us,
The ICU appears to have, at least in common/main/en.xm: <metazone type="Brasilia"> <long> <generic>Brasilia Time</generic> <standard>Brasilia Standard Time</standard> <daylight>Brasilia Summer Time</daylight> </long> </metazone> Not sure how you'd ask for "generic" rather than "standard" or "daylight" or, if you're already doing that, why it's not coughing up "Brasilia Time".
(In macOS, I can choose the city in which I live, although, alas, I can't choose Weed.)
Weed, geonameid 5573449, is very much available in the GeoNames database, including its ‘cities1000’ data which includes only populated places (not other geographic features) that either have a population of 1,000 or greater or are an administrative seat.
But Apple didn't include it. Deborah? :-) (Yes, I'm just asking because I like the name.) (BTW, the hatnote on the Wikipedia article for Weed, California is a bit amusing.)