On Fri, 2023-01-06 at 13:28 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
I chose "America/" in the 1990s to keep names shorter and avoid worrying about borderline cases - e.g., should it be "North_America/Port_of_Spain" or "South_America/Port_of_Spain"?
Now that we've moved borderline cases like America/Curacao, America/Grenada, and America/Port_of_Spain to 'backward' the second justification has less force, at least until the southern Caribbean starts messing with its clocks. However, this also means America/* is less populated by unique entries identified by zone1970.tab. Currently zone1970.tab lists 95 Zones directly under America and 75 under Asia, hardly the order-of-magnitude difference that might necessitate the disruption of a great renaming.
As Guy notes, users should not do 'ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/America' anyway; they should use a timezone chooser. Even the primitive chooser tzselect lists at most 54 names at once (all the countries in Asia, which as it happens outnumbers all the countries in North and South America combined). And commonly used timezone choosers let you point at a map, or figure things out from your location, or whatever. If we want to simplify timezone choosing we should be focusing our efforts there.
tzselect was a nice pointer since it is a command line tool. Compared to the tzdata debconf it has three steps: continent -> country -> city. I consider changing the debconf structure to that as well. tzselect is using zone1970.tab and iso3166.tab to construct the questions? How is the mapping of continents -> countries generated? I am CCing Aurelien for his opinion. -- Benjamin Drung Debian & Ubuntu Developer