<<On Wed, 17 Jul 1996 22:48:46 -0700, Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> said:
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 16:27:02 -0400 From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>
# ZONE-DESCR America New_York United_States Eastern time
Good idea, but how about a format like this instead?
America/New_York +404251-0740023 US US Eastern time
* zone name in tz database * latitude and longitude (in ISO 6709 format) of the zone's main location * country code (in ISO 3166 2-letter format) * an (English) comment describing the zone
This seems like an excellent proposal. It includes more information that I currently need or would use, but I wouldn't have to maintain any of it myself. It would not be at all hard to adapt the existing `tzsetup' framework to use this sort of data instead, and in the future we could make it completely dynamic.
[I wrote:] ... so I don't have to scratch my head and ask myself, ``OK, so which territory is Pangnirtung in?'' and similar questions.
I think that the 1200 or so people on Baffin Island for whom America/Pangnirtung are appropriate know exactly where it is (:-). But clearly a graphical display will help here too.
Well, it was a more basic problem for me: all of the other Canadian ``exceptions'' I wrote in full form (i.e., including the name of the province), since that information was available from the comments in the files. But, for those zones in the territories, no information was provided to allow me to associate the location with a territory name, and the list of Canadian zones looks rather odd when some places are listed with province names, and some are not. Now, granted, any Canadian would probably know where these other zones are located (at least to the extent of determining that they were not relevant), but my aesthetic judgment is offended by not having all of the ``exceptions'' listed with parallel descriptions.
How about if I prepare two files, one called `zones' with the above format, and one called `iso3166' that looks like this:
AD Andorra
I can deal with this. Indeed, I suspect you don't have to create the `iso3166' file at all, as I know there are a number of copies of it floating about. (It really ought to be installed in /usr/share/misc; it's a lot more useful than `flowers' or `birthtoken' or `zipcodes'.) -GAWollman PS: The person quoted below almost certainly knows where Pangnirtung is, and has probably spent some amount of time there. :-) -- Garrett A. Wollman | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same wollman@lcs.mit.edu | O Siem / The fires of freedom Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame MIT, LCS, ANA, or NSA| - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick