A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 2:48 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
In reply to: A fork for the time-zone database? by sfeam
Parent article: A fork for the time-zone database?

Heh.

But really, in seriousness: when you travel somewhere, how are you supposed to know what most populous city happens to follow the same timezone rules as that place? It shouldn't be a trivia contest.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 2:56 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Hmm...I think I remember this "travel" thing of which you speak...

I long since gave up on putting the laptop on local time. It's always US/Mountain ("Denver" - annoying to us Boulder folks) in laptopland. The phone (almost) always figures things out on its own, so that's where I look for the time.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 8:28 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

In most cases, find a large city with a similar longitude to you, that's in the same country or jurisdiction. Of course, the "Berlin is CEST" thing buggers that up, but not as badly as you might expect because the aliases still exist (so if you put e.g. "Europe/Stockholm", most properly-designed apps should be fine with that, regardless of whether they have the new or the old version of tzdb, because the new version just aliases it to "Europe/Berlin").

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 10:22 UTC (Thu) by SiB (subscriber, #4048) [Link]

Maybe "jurisdiction" should guide both granularity and naming of timezones. Hmm, how to cope with the time dependence of the jurisdiction?

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Oct 10, 2021 16:49 UTC (Sun) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (4 responses)

A good interface should have a map, with zones highlighted, and you just pick any city in the zone.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Oct 10, 2021 16:59 UTC (Sun) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (3 responses)

The best interface isn't a map - what if you're visually impaired? What if a territory status is disputed? [Taiwan/Kosovo ...] The best
interace is probably a list.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Oct 11, 2021 9:07 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The best interface is almost certainly based on geolocation (privacy risk!). Basically just identify where you are, and offer a list sorted by probability that it's your timezone based on your location. This is not a simple solution, mind.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Oct 11, 2021 14:42 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

What's your problem with territory status? Just display the map without country names.

Both lists and maps have serious shortcomings, but not to the same set of people. Thus you offer both, done.

A fork for the time-zone database?

Posted Oct 11, 2021 17:01 UTC (Mon) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> What's your problem with territory status? Just display the map without country names.

It's still a problem if you omit the country names but show the borders: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p...

> In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.
>
> The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.

(And if you don't even show borders then it'll probably be very hard for most people to locate themselves on the map.)