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

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Lucas Rocha wrote:
> Hi Dan,
> 
> 2008/4/7, Dan Winship <danw gnome org>:
>>     - Brazil: /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab lists 15 zones. I did not
>>       even bother trying to figure them out, and assigned the whole
>>       country to America/Sao_Paulo.
> 
> There are 4 timezones in Brazil. Have a look at:
> 
>   http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/america/brazil/

Right, sorry, I didn't explain this fully in the email... (I'd spent a
week dealing with it, so it was all obvious *to me*... :). The issue is
that in order for the clock applet to be able to guess the right
timezone for a location, someone has to go through and figure out which
locations are in which timezones.

Eg, Brazil has 44 cities (or at least "locations") listed:

  <country>
    <_name>Brazil</_name>
    <iso-code>BR</iso-code>
    <tz-hint>America/Sao_Paulo</tz-hint>
    <location>
      <_name>Bagé</_name>
      <code>SBBG</code>
      <coordinates>31-21S 054-07W</coordinates>
    </location>
    <location>
      <_name>Belém</_name>
      <tz-hint>America/Belem</tz-hint>
      <code>SBBE</code>
      <coordinates>01-23S 048-29W</coordinates>
    </location>
    <city>
      <_name>Belo Horizonte</_name>
      <location>
        <_name>Confins Airport</_name>
        <code>SBCF</code>
        <coordinates>19-56S 043-56W</coordinates>
      </location>
    </city>
    ...

You can see here that I cleverly guessed that Belém is in the
"America/Belem" timezone, but most of the locations don't have a
specific guess, and so they're going to inherit the default from the
<country> entry. To get better guesses, someone would have to go through
all 44 <location> entries and assign the right <tz-hint> to each one
(using maps and google results, etc, to figure out which timezone each
city is in).

In the US, this was made a little bit easier by the fact that the
Locations file already splits the US up by states, and most states are
entirely in a single timezone, so I could just assign one <tz-hint> to
the whole <state>. So if Brazil also has states or provinces, and if the
time zone divisions fall mostly along the borders of those
states/provinces, the easiest solution might be to split it up according
to those first, and just assign <tz-hint>s to the <state>s.

-- Dan