On May 22, 2013, at 5:47 PM, John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu> wrote:
Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu> wrote on Wed, 22 May 2013 at 17:43:42 -0700 in <3DBE1853-4746-467A-8BC5-6040546C1226@alum.mit.edu>:
I, on the other hand, think users should, in the best of circumstances, not be presented with anything at all, and have the system automatically pick the right zone and, in circumstances where that's not possible, the user should be presented with a map that lets them pick a location, and users should never have to see a TZ identifier.
"That's nice," but we're not there yet.
Well, maybe you're not, but I am. :-) Hopefully people designing time zone selectors for at least *some* desktop environments have looked at at least *one* OS X machine....
I still regularly type
TZ=Asia/Calcutta date
to determine the time in Bangalore, India, before sending email to folks there.
So do I, but I don't consider it the tz database folks' responsibility not to confuse or upset me by choosing the "wrong" city or.... I view zone names the way I view LANG settings - cryptic strings designed by nerds for nerds and software, not stuff the average user should expect to be straightforward.