Interesting. As I don't use tzselect directly, I had assumed the comments were there for documentation purposes only. I didn't realize that they were intended for display to the end-user. If that’s the case, then why are the comments they English only? Especially for zones where English is not the primary language? -----Original Message----- From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu] Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2014 3:47 PM To: Matt Johnson; 'Time zone mailing list' Subject: Re: [tz] [PATCH] New file time.tab, superseding zone.tab Matt Johnson wrote:
Someone living there would have previously selected Germany, then Busingen. But now they have to select Germany, then Zurich.
Actually, after selecting Germany tzselect now asks you this: Please select one of the following time zone regions. 1) Swiss time 2) Berlin time
people living elsewhere in Germany might get confused as to why Zurich is a choice at all
Without the change, many people in Germany might have gotten confused as to why Busingen is a choice at all, so the change isn't making things worse. On the contrary, to my mind "Swiss time" is a bit of an improvement, as it makes it clearer what's going on to someone who's not a time zone expert. Perhaps the wording could be improved further, but the old wording wasn't all that great either.
Should one infer that the intent here is to reduce the usage of links?
Yes, one of the motivations was to not have to maintain seemingly-separate entries for what are really aliases. The new file time.tab doesn't have any links; this should have been checked by "make check_tables" but I see there was a typo in its implementation, so I installed the attached patch into the experimental version to fix that.