On Sat, 2023-01-07 at 13:30 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 2023-01-07 01:53, Benjamin Drung via tz wrote:
Thanks. Could you add " (Germany)" to Büsingen? It is too small to be commonly known in Germany.
I looked into how that string is used, came up with what I hope is a better idea, tested it, and fixed another glitch or two that I found.
The idea is that zone1970.tab's comment column should cover only countries that have multiple timezones, so that it needn't worry about summarizing all the other countries (which don't need the summary anyway).
I installed the attached patches to implement this. With it, if you run tzselect and choose Germany, you see:
Please select one of the following timezones. 1) Büsingen enclave 2) Germany (most areas)
which I hope is good enough in the context where you've already picked Germany. It's OK when someone who runs tzselect doesn't know about Büsingen, as they should just shrug and pick the "most areas" line.
Patch 1 implements this change.
Thanks. This improves the timezone selection and I am happy about the result. The updated description of the comments column is clear enough to understand the purpose. The "present if and only if" could be checked by some tool.
Patch 3 improves tzselect so that it takes advantage of the Patch 1 change. This change improves behavior both with older and bleeding-edge tzdata. Older tzselects will still work, though their (already-confusing) messages will be perhaps a bit more confusing in some cases. I hope this tzselect improvement migrates into Ubuntu soon.
tzselect is shipped by the libc-bin binary package which comes from the glibc source package. I do not know and haven't investigated how tzselect migrates to the glibc source package (is this Debian/Ubuntu specific or does glibc upstream include it?). -- Benjamin Drung Debian & Ubuntu Developer