Re: [PATCH] Remove locale timezone information

[pinskia at gmail dot com]

> On Aug 6, 2015, at 4:30 PM, keld@keldix.com wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Aug 05, 2015 at 10:56:44PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>> On 05 Aug 2015 09:20, Paul Eggert wrote:
>>>> On 08/05/2015 03:22 AM, keld@keldix.com wrote:
>>>> For countries with more timezones, the locale data helps narrowing down the
>>>> choices. And there are not that many countries with more than 1 timezone,
>>>> eg USA, Canada, Russia and Greenland. Many big countries like China and India
>>>> only have 1 timezone
>>> 
>>> Actually, China has two time zones: tzdata's Asia/Shanghai and 
>>> Asia/Urumqi both reflect officially-kept time.  Even Germany has more 
>>> than one tzdata entry, due to the a difference in post-1970 history of 
>>> timekeeping in its Swiss enclaves.  So the problem of many time zones 
>>> for one locale is bigger than what you're suggesting, even if we ignore 
>>> traveling users (which is a pretty big class to ignore).
>> 
>> a cursory search shows many more countries as well:
>> Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan,
>> Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Greenland (does that mean Denmark
>> too?).  that's at least 16% of the world's population (35% if you count
>> China).
> 
> I am glad you are now coming forward with actual facts, Mike.
> Then we can hopefully find out what the facts are, and probably agree on something.
> I have previously done discussion with people were we were intially 
> in violent diagreement, but along the road I got a little wiser and probably
> my opponent also got a little wiser, and we found some workable solutions. 
> That is why I keep responding to almost all of pour posts in a technical
> tone, and I hope you could do the same, for the benefit of the glibc project.
> 
> I have as you may know been involved with glibc i18n for many years,
> and I designed and speced many of the i18n enhancements over POSIX/C,
> and also provided lots of data for that purpose to the glibc project.
> If I am not corrected with my futurisic ideas, I will probably continue infinitely
> on this path - till now it has led us much of the way to where we are now.
> 
> Most of these countries I have already mentioned in previous posts.
> For Greenland, yes, it is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but not part
> of the State of Denmark. Greenland has its own country code, and
> thus its own locales.
> 
> I also mentioned in previous posts that narrowing the choice of locales down to
> two or three is a big improvement over the current state, even if you cannot 
> fully determine a locale for a country. Do you think there is any merit in that
> observation, Mike?
> 
> My conclusion was then that the only countries that did not benefit 
> hugely on the narrow range of plausible locales were the USA, Canada and Russia.
> But anyway, having to chose between about a dozen different locales that can be presented 
> in one display, is a much nicer option than chosing amongst a long list of all glibc
> locales.
> 
>> and that's just for the current period of time.  as you highlight, if you
>> look back historically, there are other countries that spanned timezones.
> 
> Yes, the Olson tz database probably has all these data. 
> Still, if you order the timezones for a country in some way, eg order of population,
> or alphabetically, you could probably find a solution that is useful to most
> people. And then you have the option of setting a specific
> TZ variable if you have someting really special. This is UNIX, you know,
> we can tweek it endlessly.
> 
>> locales also are not strictly defined by country borders which means the
>> timezone spans are even higher (i'm not counting people who travel).
> 
> I doubt this is a big case. And anyway it can be tweeked, as noted above, right?

It is a big case in the gnu community and most open source community where people go to conferences. There is one such starting tomorrow. I doubt I want to force to use the one of the cet locals to get the timezone in Prague. 

Thanks,
Andrew


> 
> best regards
> Keld