Pacific islands as identifiers
Hi, I was recently setting the time zone on my computer to my current location -- Honiara, Solomon Islands. In my operating system's drop-down list of "Cities" (I use a Linux distro based on Ubuntu), I could not find Honiara. I finally ended up clicking on the map approximately where I thought it would be. To my surprise, where I clicked had the label "Guadalcanal". I wasn't expecting that, and certainly wasn't looking for Guadalcanal in the list -- Honiara would have made a lot more sense to me (e.g., https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/solomon-islands). I'm wondering what the rationale is for using island / province names for some Pacific nations and city names for others (e.g., Apia, Samoa; Port Moresby, PNG)? And I wonder if knowing that there are historic animosities in a country between people from one island and another would be enough to consider changing an apparent favouring of one island over another? For a brief and somewhat current analysis, see https://www.csis.org/analysis/deep-roots-solomon-islands-ongoing-political-c.... I offer this for your kind consideration, Paul Unger
On 10/21/22 19:14, Paul-Cathy Unger via tz wrote:
I'm wondering what the rationale is for using island / province names for some Pacific nations and city names for others
When I chose those names decades ago, I preferred island names as I figured they would be easier for most users to recognize and/or remember. However, I chose a city name when the island name was ambiguous (e.g., Samoa) or when the island is so large that a time zone split is plausible (e.g., New Guinea). Guadalcanal is neither large nor ambiguously named, so I used the island name in that case. I just now set the time zone on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, and it gave me a little map of the world that I clicked on; there was no drop down list of names in the traditional sense. Perhaps you can ask your distro maintainers to use that part of Ubuntu, as TZDB names are not meant for general user consumption. For more info, please see <https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html#naming>, which says. 'Inexperienced users are not expected to select these names unaided. Distributors should provide documentation and/or a simple selection interface that explains each name via a map or via descriptive text like "Czech Republic" instead of the timezone name "|Europe/Prague|".' If the name's user-visible explanation or description is inappropriate, you might try writing to whoever maintains that (it's probably not us...).
participants (2)
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Paul Eggert -
Paul-Cathy Unger