On Fri, 12 Aug 2022, Paul Eggert via tz wrote:
The zone1970.tab files provides me with a list of time zones, one per country Not sure about the "one per country" part. Some countries have more than one Zone, and some Zones have more than one country.
Indeed, a bit poor wording from my side. A vast majority of countries have only one zone, so basing it on country is not such a bad idea. I'm sorry if some of this comes off as a rant, it isn't, it is just me trying to present the data thas is made available to me in a manner that is useful for the end-user of our product, without introducing a lot of extra stuff that I have to maintain myself. My thinking is to display the country names as the top selection entry, as most people know the country they live in, and for the vast majority that is enough (special care has to be taken for the multi-zone countries). I do not do this today. I currently have a simple drop-down selector where I group zones based on the current clock time in the zone (so the list will be ordered differently depending when in the year it is opened), and as the selectable entry I currently have "city" (the BBB part of the AAA/BBB or AAA/CCC/BBB zone specifiers), time zone abbreviation (if any) and the comment. This goes a long way to make it usable, but using the city name isn't the best solution, as many on the list have already noted. Showing "Norway (CEST)" instead of "Oslo (CEST)" would probably be an improvement. Showing "Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Svalbard (CEST)" probably not as much.
This sort of issue is not new to 2022b. For example, if software ignores zone1970.tab's column 1 it's not immediately obvious that Europe/Prague covers at least part of Slovakia, and this has been true ever since zone1970.tab was introduced in release 2014f.
I was looking for that, but the change predated the zone1970.tab file itself, so I didn't find where to deduplicate that, I need to do some further research on that. We recently released what is likely to be the last patch of the oldest version that have proper time zone support (it supports side-loading timezone updates), so I can only play with the zone1970.tab file to make the list easier to read for those existing systems. -- \\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/