On 03/01/2016 02:04 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
Brian Inglis wrote:
Not clear in lines such as those below that Eastern, Central refer to time zone and not the geographical part of the region - either add the word Time or some other indication e.g. EST/EDT, CST/CDT to keep it short:
In context it's not so bad (see below for the relevant screen, for Canada). Perhaps "EST+EDT" would be clearer than "Eastern" and similarly for "CST+CDT" and I suppose "MST+MDT" and "PST+PDT" but it's a close call.
Please select one of the following time zone regions. 1) Newfoundland; Labrador (southeast) 15) Central - NU (Resolute) 2) Atlantic - NS (most areas); PE 16) Central - NU (central) 3) Atlantic - NS (Cape Breton) 17) CST - SK (most areas) 4) Atlantic - New Brunswick 18) CST - SK (midwest) 5) Atlantic - Labrador (most areas) 19) Mountain - AB; BC (E); SK (W) 6) AST - QC (Lower North Shore) 20) Mountain - NU (west) 7) Eastern - ON, QC (most areas) 21) Mountain - NT (central) 8) Eastern - ON, QC (no DST 1967-73) 22) Mountain - NT (west) 9) Eastern - ON (Thunder Bay) 23) MST - BC (Creston) 10) Eastern - NU (most east areas) 24) MST - BC (Dawson Cr, Ft St John) 11) Eastern - NU (Pangnirtung) 25) MST - BC (Ft Nelson) 12) EST - ON (Atikokan); NU (Coral H) 26) Pacific - BC (most areas) 13) Central - ON (west); Manitoba 27) Pacific - Yukon (south) 14) Central - ON (Rainy R, Ft Frances) 28) Pacific - Yukon (north) #?
When I was considering how to shorten US and CA enough so they would page correctly, the most obvious target was the common zone name prefix. In light of the recent discussion on the mailing list with regard to dropping alpha zone abbreviations in favor of offsets, I was going to try a patch to replace the existing comments' prefix with offsets. I thought this might be accepted, because it is already used for RU. I was going to take it a step further by applying a simple offset as done with "+02 - Central Africa Time" as a prefix to all of the zone table comments. Is DST information needed to choose a zone file? In the example list above it doesn't seem to be. On a related subject; I saw when you where shorting the zone table comments, Paul, that you also noticed the ordering was not so good and jockeyed that around as well. That is the reason I submitted a patch to sort the local regions' lists. If all of the comments were prefixed with an offset, then sorting the tzselect menus would create the geographical ordering to which you gave priority over a lexical sort. This would make maintaining the zone tables easier, because strict attention to order within the file would no longer matter. The fact that you just had to rearranged the file order illustrates how this collation creep can work its way in over time.