On 9/29/21 14:26, Aurelien Jarno via tz wrote:
If you consider a world map to select the timezone, with each timezone represented by a circle from the coordinates in the zone1970.tab
zone1970.tab has never been intended as a "nice" geographical interface in that sense. At the end of this email is a tzselect sample session (using 2021a, so more-recent changes are irrelevant) that uses nearest-neighbor from the South Pole, employing zone1970.tab's data. As you can see, tzselect prompts with ten nearest neighbors that are all incorrect because the correct answer is Pacific/Auckland, which is nearly 6,000 km away. Akthough I'm sure this way of using tzselect could be improved a bit, it's hardly worth the trouble as almost nobody uses it this way (the few people who use tzselect, typically don't take choice "10)" below). Instead of tzselect, most people use maps based on data that are proprietary (or cited in tz-link.html) and are outside tzdb's scope. These maps commonly depict some tall skinny timezones one of which could easily incorporate both Auckland and the South Pole (such a timezone need not be visually contiguous), and this is what I suggest for user-facing interfaces based on distances. Riyadh and Syowa can be handled similarly. ----- $ tzselect Please identify a location so that time zone rules can be set correctly. Please select a continent, ocean, "coord", or "TZ". 1) Africa 2) Americas 3) Antarctica 4) Asia 5) Atlantic Ocean 6) Australia 7) Europe 8) Indian Ocean 9) Pacific Ocean 10) coord - I want to use geographical coordinates. 11) TZ - I want to specify the timezone using the Posix TZ format. #? 10 Please enter coordinates in ISO 6709 notation. For example, +4042-07403 stands for 40 degrees 42 minutes north, 74 degrees 3 minutes west. -9000+00000 Please select one of the following timezones, echo listed roughly in increasing order of distance from -9000+00000. 1) Antarctica - Vostok 6) Antarctica - Rothera 2) Antarctica - Troll 7) Antarctica - Dumont-d'Urville 3) Antarctica - Syowa 8) Antarctica - Casey 4) Antarctica - Davis 9) Antarctica - Palmer 5) Antarctica - Mawson 10) Argentina - Tierra del Fuego (TF) #?