Dear Sir or Madam, I have a question that bothered me for many years since I started to use the Linux systems. When we, Chinese users, are selecting the desired timezone for our Linux boxes, we always feel weird that there has been no "Asia/Beijing". Instead we see "Asia/Shanghai" or "Asia/Chongqing". This might by how IANA "thinks" what the China timezone convention is, but SERIOUSLY this is not what we, Chinese users, are expecting. We would be very happy to see "Asia/Beijing" among the list. I googled that this question has been asked in many places to different maintainers or distributors, and finally I figured out that IANA is the ultimate upstream who can fix this issue. As a matter of fact, if you take a look at the Windows time zone settings dialog, Beijing is in the list, but no Shanghai. Please add ""Asia/Beijing" to the list. Please take it into consideration and thank you very much! Best Regards, Hanjun Kou, an ordinary Chinese Linux user
寇含军 wrote:
if you take a look at the Windows time zone settings dialog, Beijing is in the list, but no Shanghai.
Similarly, if you look at the time zone settings dialog program published by the tz project, you'll see "Beijing Time", not "Shanghai Time". Please see the shell transcript at the end of this message. The string 'Asia/Shanghai' is a tzdata-specific identifier, not intended to be visible to non-experts. It's like 'America/New_York' (which is not the string that a non-expert user would expect in Washington DC) or 'Asia/Kolkata' (likewise for a non-expert in New Delhi). If you're selecting time zones via a user interface that's showing the string "Shanghai Time", I suggest writing to whoever's maintaining that user interface (it's not us :-). $ 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 time zone using the Posix TZ format. #? 4 Please select a country whose clocks agree with yours. 1) Afghanistan 18) Israel 35) Palestine 2) Armenia 19) Japan 36) Philippines 3) Azerbaijan 20) Jordan 37) Qatar 4) Bahrain 21) Kazakhstan 38) Russia 5) Bangladesh 22) Korea (North) 39) Saudi Arabia 6) Bhutan 23) Korea (South) 40) Singapore 7) Brunei 24) Kuwait 41) Sri Lanka 8) Cambodia 25) Kyrgyzstan 42) Syria 9) China 26) Laos 43) Taiwan 10) Cyprus 27) Lebanon 44) Tajikistan 11) East Timor 28) Macau 45) Thailand 12) Georgia 29) Malaysia 46) Turkmenistan 13) Hong Kong 30) Mongolia 47) United Arab Emirates 14) India 31) Myanmar (Burma) 48) Uzbekistan 15) Indonesia 32) Nepal 49) Vietnam 16) Iran 33) Oman 50) Yemen 17) Iraq 34) Pakistan #? 9 Please select one of the following time zone regions. 1) Beijing Time 2) Xinjiang Time #?
Looks like this logic is not well understood by the communities. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libgweather/+bug/228554 Even the latest Ubuntu systems still only have Shanghai in the "Time and Date Settings". The same thing for PHP: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.asia.php It's better if you could add the "Asia/Beijing" identifier. Thanks! ------------------ Original ------------------ From: "Paul Eggert";<eggert@cs.ucla.edu>; Date: Tue, Jul 21, 2015 09:58 PM To: "寇含军"<hjkou@qq.com>; "Time zone mailing list"<tz@iana.org>; Subject: Re: [tz] Time Zone City for China 寇含军 wrote:
if you take a look at the Windows time zone settings dialog, Beijing is in the list, but no Shanghai.
Similarly, if you look at the time zone settings dialog program published by the tz project, you'll see "Beijing Time", not "Shanghai Time". Please see the shell transcript at the end of this message. The string 'Asia/Shanghai' is a tzdata-specific identifier, not intended to be visible to non-experts. It's like 'America/New_York' (which is not the string that a non-expert user would expect in Washington DC) or 'Asia/Kolkata' (likewise for a non-expert in New Delhi). If you're selecting time zones via a user interface that's showing the string "Shanghai Time", I suggest writing to whoever's maintaining that user interface (it's not us :-). $ 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 time zone using the Posix TZ format. #? 4 Please select a country whose clocks agree with yours. 1) Afghanistan 18) Israel 35) Palestine 2) Armenia 19) Japan 36) Philippines 3) Azerbaijan 20) Jordan 37) Qatar 4) Bahrain 21) Kazakhstan 38) Russia 5) Bangladesh 22) Korea (North) 39) Saudi Arabia 6) Bhutan 23) Korea (South) 40) Singapore 7) Brunei 24) Kuwait 41) Sri Lanka 8) Cambodia 25) Kyrgyzstan 42) Syria 9) China 26) Laos 43) Taiwan 10) Cyprus 27) Lebanon 44) Tajikistan 11) East Timor 28) Macau 45) Thailand 12) Georgia 29) Malaysia 46) Turkmenistan 13) Hong Kong 30) Mongolia 47) United Arab Emirates 14) India 31) Myanmar (Burma) 48) Uzbekistan 15) Indonesia 32) Nepal 49) Vietnam 16) Iran 33) Oman 50) Yemen 17) Iraq 34) Pakistan #? 9 Please select one of the following time zone regions. 1) Beijing Time 2) Xinjiang Time #?
寇含军 wrote:
Even the latest Ubuntu systems still only have Shanghai in the "Time and Date Settings".
Yes, and when I click on Ürümqi the Ubuntu Time & Date selector highlights eastern Kazazhstan instead of any part of China (!). Also, Ubuntu's selector is still derived from old versions of tzdata that had unnecessary separate entries for Chongqing and Harbin and etc. And I'm sure it has other bugs. To get those bugs fixed the usual procedure is to file a bug report with the maintainers responsible. If that's something you want to do, I suggest filing a bug report against the Ubuntu timezonemap package and the GNOME gnome-control-center packages, as neither of these packages should be fooling around with Chongqing or Harbin nowadays. In your bug report please make it clear that this is not yet another "Change Asia/Shanghai to Asia/Beijing" bug report, Instead, I suggest saying that there are problems with the user interface in China regardless of what tzdata identifier denotes Chinese time. To improve the probability of a fix, it'd be helpful if your bug report included a patch. The PHP web page you mentioned merely lists tzdata identifiers including backwards links, and if that's the intent I don't see a bug there.
On Jul 21, 2015, at 10:07 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
寇含军 wrote:
Even the latest Ubuntu systems still only have Shanghai in the "Time and Date Settings".
Yes, and when I click on Ürümqi the Ubuntu Time & Date selector highlights eastern Kazazhstan instead of any part of China (!). Also, Ubuntu's selector is still derived from old versions of tzdata that had unnecessary separate entries for Chongqing and Harbin and etc. And I'm sure it has other bugs.
Several time zone selectors I've seen are lazily-written crap that either directly display the tzdb name or tweak it slightly by, for example, splitting it into continent and city and displaying them in a more "user-friendly" form. Ubuntu's is one of them, although it at least doesn't do something *really* cheap and crappy such as just displaying tzdb ids directly. If somebody wants to see how to do it *right*, find a friend with a Mac and ask them to show you the "Time Zone" pane of the "Date & Time" item in System Preferences. It's a system that uses the tzdb (being a UN*X, after all), but that doesn't expose tzdb identifiers to ordinary users. If you turn off the "Set time zone automatically using current location" - which, in many cases, is the right way to set the time zone, rather than having the user bother to do anything at all (consider somebody who travels a lot for work, and whose travels take them to multiple time zones) - you can drag the blue "you are here" dot around the map, and it'll show, at the bottom of the screen, a time zone name (not a tzdb name, a name such as "Mountain Daylight Time" or "Central European Standard Time" or "China Standard Time", and a "Closest City" entry below it, with a drop-down list of several nearby cities (most if not all of which are *not* the city in the tzdb name). The map, at least on my machine running Mountain Lion, has "Geonames.org" on it, so presumably geonames.org is responsible for at least some of the data. Apple ship a set of time zone boundary files: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/TimeZoneData/TimeZoneData-62/boundari... in what I guess is GPX format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Exchange_Format I don't know whether Apple got them from somebody else (or who that is) or produced them by themselves. Some other information, such as time zone names probably comes from the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository. I'm guessing the nearby city list comes from elsewhere. So it's a lot of work to make something as good as Apple's, but if there's some way for various free-software UN*Xes to do so together, that might help. For example, if places to get free-software (free-data?) time zone boundaries, and maps from latitude+longitude to tzdb zones, and lists of cities and their locations, could be enumerated somewhere, that would help, as would common code atop which ${YOUR-FAVORITE-DESKTOP-ENVIRONMENT} could implement code. (No, I don't have time to do much if any of that, sorry.) That code and data could also be used by users of tzdb *other* than operating systems. And, maybe, after enough systems start providing UI that doesn't just show tzdb IDs or slightly-tweaked tzdb IDs, I can stop wishing we'd picked random alphanumeric IDs for tzdb zones, so that people wouldn't end up attaching Deep Significance to the character strings used for them. :-)
On Tue, 21 Jul 2015, Paul Eggert wrote:
寇含军 wrote:
The same thing for PHP: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.asia.php
The PHP web page you mentioned merely lists tzdata identifiers including backwards links, and if that's the intent I don't see a bug there.
That's indeed the intent. cheers, Derick (PHP Date/Time maintainer)
On Jul 21, 2015, at 7:19 AM, "寇含军" <hjkou@qq.com> wrote:
Looks like this logic is not well understood by the communities.
Then we need to do a better job of explaining it to them.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libgweather/+bug/228554 Even the latest Ubuntu systems still only have Shanghai in the "Time and Date Settings".
Wow, that's a *depressingly bad* time zone selector. Somebody should complain. In fact, somebody just did: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-control-center/+bug/1477032 Hopefully this will help the communities understand the logic better. Perhaps I shall set up a VM with the latest Fedora and see if it's any better and, if not, file another bug there. (Maybe SuSE as well? Un-Canonicalized Debian?)
The same thing for PHP: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.asia.php
It's better if you could add the "Asia/Beijing" identifier.
It's even *better* if time zone selectors stopped turning the list of tzdb identifiers into a list of cities to offer to the user or, even worse, just offering the tzdb identifiers directly as choices to users. Then it won't *matter* to non-nerds what identifiers are offered (and nerds will understand that the identifiers are, as Paul said, tzdata-specific identifiers not intended to be visible to non-experts, and won't worry about it). Apple doesn't expose the list of tzdb identifiers to non-nerd end users, and nobody else should, either.
On 22/07/15 10:26, Guy Harris wrote:
It's even *better* if time zone selectors stopped turning the list of tzdb identifiers into a list of cities to offer to the user or, even worse, just offering the tzdb identifiers directly as choices to users.
Distributions take the easy route, which is perhaps one reason that the base identifiers should be a reasonable fall back solution, but in practice the lookup for timezone based on location still needs a reliable source. geonames does provide a fairly accurate return on current tzid for a location, but it's not the sort of thing that would be built into a distribution. I have to admit to taking the easy option myself, but a more powerful lookup package does have a place in these more global times? That is not something that TZ is tasked to supply though. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk
On Jul 22, 2015, at 3:14 AM, Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> wrote:
On 22/07/15 10:26, Guy Harris wrote:
It's even *better* if time zone selectors stopped turning the list of tzdb identifiers into a list of cities to offer to the user or, even worse, just offering the tzdb identifiers directly as choices to users.
Distributions take the easy route,
Let's do what we can to try to get them to stop doing so.
which is perhaps one reason that the base identifiers should be a reasonable fall back solution,
That means changing the criteria for choosing a tzid so that Use the most populous among locations in a zone, e.g. prefer 'Shanghai' to 'Beijing'. Among locations with similar populations, pick the best-known location, e.g. prefer 'Rome' to 'Milan'. is changed to "Use a location that's a 'reasonable fallback solution' for time zone choosers that don't have a good set of cities to choose from" or "Use the best-known location".
but in practice the lookup for timezone based on location still needs a reliable source. geonames does provide a fairly accurate return on current tzid for a location, but it's not the sort of thing that would be built into a distribution.
http://www.geonames.org/about.html "GeoNames Users * Apple SnowLeopard, Ubuntu ..." so at least *one* distribution uses GeoNames for something. This page: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-10-10-Will-Have-a-Revamped-Installer-1... claims No more region and city boxes in the timezone setup page! All you'll have to do on this page is to type the city you live in and the installer will automatically get the correct timezone. This new functionality is based on the amazing work done by the developers at GeoNames.org. although, as per the bug I filed, it didn't seem to work for me on 15.04. If there's code there, it's probably using the Web services API for this: http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html#timezone If it's *supposed* to work, that's getting close to what Apple does, but doing nothing when I type a city name into it and hitting Enter doesn't count as "working" in my book.
I have to admit to taking the easy option myself, but a more powerful lookup package does have a place in these more global times? That is not something that TZ is tasked to supply though.
At *most*, I could see the tzdb providing tzdb zone boundaries; it's outside our scope to provide location services or lists of cities near particular locations. And if the GeoNames people are willing to provide that - and to do what's necessary to update that whenever we introduce a new tzdb zone - we don't need to provide that ourselves. Given that Web services API, they may well do that.
On 22/07/15 10:26, Guy Harris wrote:
Perhaps I shall set up a VM with the latest Fedora and see if it's any better and, if not, file another bug there. (Maybe SuSE as well? Un-Canonicalized Debian?)
I just had a look at the Fedora 22 KDE timezone selector. There's a search box into which I typed "China" and that gives me a table like this: +-----------+----------------------------+---------------+ | Area | Region | Comment | +-----------+----------------------------+---------------+ | Hong Kong | Asia/Hong Kong SAR (China) | | | Macau | Asia/Macau SAR (China) | | | Shanghai | Asia/China | Bejing Time | | Urumqi | Asia/China | Xinjiang Time | +-----------+----------------------------+---------------+ I was going to compare that to the Gnome F23 version but that just crashes :) That'll teach me for running pre-alpha. So it's not all bad, but it falls a long way short of what the mac does. Oh, and it reports my current time zone as "Europe/London (LMT)" which is a little weird. And I know I'm used to this living in a country with four possible names, but I can search for "United Kingdom" and find London but Britain, Great Britain and England all fail to find anything. The Scots, Welsh and those in Ulster are going to be similarly disappointed. Especially the Scots :) jch
On 22/07/15 12:12, John Haxby wrote:
Oh, and it reports my current time zone as "Europe/London (LMT)" which is a little weird. And I know I'm used to this living in a country with four possible names, but I can search for "United Kingdom" and find London but Britain, Great Britain and England all fail to find anything. The Scots, Welsh and those in Ulster are going to be similarly disappointed. Especially the Scots :)
I tend to go for "Europe/Isle_of_Man" since that might include the back file, but certainly the alternate UK timezones should have different historic data for each area :( -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk
John Haxby wrote:
I just had a look at the Fedora 22 KDE timezone selector. ... Oh, and it reports my current time zone as "Europe/London (LMT)" which is a little weird.
More than a little weird. London Mean Time (LMT) hasn't been used in any practical sense since 1880. Does Fedora's time zone selector also come equipped with pneumatic tubes and steam valves?
On 22 Jul 2015, at 18:16, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
John Haxby wrote:
I just had a look at the Fedora 22 KDE timezone selector. ... Oh, and it reports my current time zone as "Europe/London (LMT)" which is a little weird.
More than a little weird. London Mean Time (LMT) hasn't been used in any practical sense since 1880. Does Fedora's time zone selector also come equipped with pneumatic tubes and steam valves?
It’s funny you should mention that … jch
On 2015-07-22 05:12, John Haxby wrote:
Oh, and it reports my current time zone as "Europe/London (LMT)" which is a little weird. And I know I'm used to this living in a country with
What is reporting your zone - Fedora date or KDE? Check your time has not rolled back three centuries, as zdump shows: Europe/London Wed Dec 1 00:01:14 1847 UT = Tue Nov 30 23:59:59 1847 LMT isdst=0 gmtoff=-75 Europe/London Wed Dec 1 00:01:15 1847 UT = Wed Dec 1 00:01:15 1847 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=0
four possible names, but I can search for "United Kingdom" and find London but Britain, Great Britain and England all fail to find anything.
Try GB - ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 country code - parts of the UK would be in ISO 3166-2 country subdivisions - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:GB.
The Scots, Welsh and those in Ulster are going to be similarly disappointed. Especially the Scots :)
For accurate historical times in Ulster, Dublin mean time was used until 1916-10-01 02:00, so a historical database would have to split off an Ulster or Belfast time zone to reflect the difference before 1916 and separation after 1921. Only difference in Scotland was adoption of New Style year starting 1600-01-01, still using the Julian calendar, compared to 1752-01-01 in England, Wales, Ireland, prior to adopting the Gregorian calendar in all of the UK and colonies after 1752-09-02. This also changed the start of the tax year from Anunciation/Lady Day Mar 25 Julian until 1752 to Apr 6 Gregorian from 1753. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis
On 22/07/15 23:34, Brian Inglis wrote:
For accurate historical times in Ulster, Dublin mean time was used until 1916-10-01 02:00, so a historical database would have to split off an Ulster or Belfast time zone to reflect the difference before 1916 and separation after 1921.
The Dublin times are in europe, but Belfast and the other UK zones are in the backzone file ... -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk
On 22/07/15 23:34, Brian Inglis wrote:
On 2015-07-22 05:12, John Haxby wrote:
Oh, and it reports my current time zone as "Europe/London (LMT)" which is a little weird. And I know I'm used to this living in a country with
What is reporting your zone - Fedora date or KDE? Check your time has not rolled back three centuries, as zdump shows: Europe/London Wed Dec 1 00:01:14 1847 UT = Tue Nov 30 23:59:59 1847 LMT isdst=0 gmtoff=-75 Europe/London Wed Dec 1 00:01:15 1847 UT = Wed Dec 1 00:01:15 1847 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=0
It's just KDE that has lost its marbles.
four possible names, but I can search for "United Kingdom" and find London but Britain, Great Britain and England all fail to find anything.
Try GB - ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 country code - parts of the UK would be in ISO 3166-2 country subdivisions - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:GB.
The Scots, Welsh and those in Ulster are going to be similarly disappointed. Especially the Scots :)
For accurate historical times in Ulster, Dublin mean time was used until 1916-10-01 02:00, so a historical database would have to split off an Ulster or Belfast time zone to reflect the difference before 1916 and separation after 1921.
Only difference in Scotland was adoption of New Style year starting 1600-01-01, still using the Julian calendar, compared to 1752-01-01 in England, Wales, Ireland, prior to adopting the Gregorian calendar in all of the UK and colonies after 1752-09-02. This also changed the start of the tax year from Anunciation/Lady Day Mar 25 Julian until 1752 to Apr 6 Gregorian from 1753.
It wasn't the historic time that's at issue. Any number of choose-a-country drop down boxes require a bit of hunting around. If I'm lucky, "United Kingdom" is at the top, if not I scroll down to the end and look for it there among the other Uniteds. Sometimes it's not there so whizz back up to the "G"s and look for Great Britain. That's usually enough because if someone wants England then it's going to be a choice of the four countries/principalities of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I've yet to see "Britain" as a choice. Or the seven ancient kingdoms :) The TZ database is right not to try to assign cities to countries in most cases. Continents are bad enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uBcq1x7P34 jch jch
participants (7)
-
Brian Inglis -
Derick Rethans -
Guy Harris -
John Haxby -
Lester Caine -
Paul Eggert -
寇含军