Guy Harris wrote:
Users ideally shouldn't be exposed to the tzdb maintainers' choices of LOCATIONs at all. "Los Angeles" isn't much better than "America/Los_Angeles", especially for people not in the LA area.
And, depending on the locale, there might be ways of choosing between different timezones that cover the same time zone, e.g.
(UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (most locations) (UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (Arizona)
(with whatever tweaks would be most straightforward to include the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Nation) that might be more obvious than
(UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (Denver) (UTC-7:00) Mountain Time (Phoenix)
("But I'm in Boulder!" "And I'm in Tempe!" "And *I'm* in Jackson Hole!").
And I’m in Lakewood! (Oh, wait. That’s right next door to Denver.) This is what we get from a known, reliable source that offers human-readable names in English (or, importantly, 140 other languages) corresponding to tzids. Some of the names are probably not perfect for a picker. We already know that “(other)” and “(most locations)” are not always perfect either, especially when presented out of context: Other than what? What does “most” include? We did the best we could without having to curate the list ourselves, surely a recipe for disaster.
Not sure how you'd ask for "generic" rather than "standard" or "daylight" or, if you're already doing that, why it's not coughing up "Brasilia Time".
We’re using a standard .NET Core call that queries ICU in a Linux container, and makes a Windows call when running on Windows. There are no options to select names for standard, daylight, or generic, and I don’t know why it chooses standard by default. The ICU folks might know. -- Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org