Re: help needed with non-US time zones for clock applet

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

Skipping past the specifics of your post I just wanted to note this has
seemed a bit counterintuitive to me for a few years now.

It seemed to me like it would be best if one of the first configuratin
steps shown to users was a world map, and then based on the location they
choose (particularly if they are specific and choose country and major
city) a whole lot of clever defaults about their locale and timezone can
be inferred from there.  (Sure there will be exceptions native English
speakers who are living in Spanish speaking country, and many countries
are multilingual but it seems like a very reasonable thing to set
language, keyboard, and other settings to a sange default based on
location.)

The install process I'm most familiar with is the one in Red Hat/Fedora,
and the time zone/map question comes much later in the process, whereas I
think it should be the first thing asked.  Not very familiar with how
Novell does it and how you get things done in Gnome will I suppose be
subjected to certain contraints by the different information distributions
provide.

It is great that you are already making clever inferences and providing
users with better choices just that the task could be made easier if this
had been set earlier.

Taken this offlist, since I want to avoid bikeshedding getting in the way
of your more immediate concerns but perhaps this is something that could
be discussed further?

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanhorkan
http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/

On Mon, 7 Apr 2008, Dan Winship wrote:

> Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:05:58 -0400
> From: Dan Winship <danw gnome org>
> To: "desktop-devel-list gnome org" <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
> Cc: gnome-i18n gnome org
> Subject: help needed with non-US time zones for clock applet
>
> (Specifically, if you live in [or are knowledgeable about] AR, AU, BR,
> CA, CN, CD, GL, ID, KZ, MY, MX, RU, UA, or UZ, please read this. Thanks :)
>
> Vincent has just committed the patches to fix the "clock applet guesses
> the wrong timezone" bug, but this relies on
> libgweather/data/Locations.xml.in having the correct timezones listed
> for various places.
>
> For large countries that span multiple timezones, it takes some work to
> get this right. I spent a while getting the US right, and I did some
> investigation on most of the others, but there are still places where
> the information is wrong (especially in the non-English-speaking
> countries, which it was harder for me to find reliable information about).