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[Launchpad Bug Tracker <1477032@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

** Changed in: unity-control-center (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Confirmed

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1477032

Title:
  Time & Date time zone chooser doesn't offer a full set of cities

Status in unity-control-center package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  If I start the Time & Date chooser in 15.04, the "Time & Date" pane
  does not let me to specify a city by typing its name into the
  "Location" box (I can type a name, but it's not obvious how to make it
  select that city), nor does it offer a drop-down list of cities in
  that box.  If I drag the "you are here" blob to the West Coast of the
  US, it puts "Los Angeles" in the "Location" box, the fact that I'm
  currently in Palo Alto, about 400 miles from Los Angeles,
  nonwithstanding.

  The fact that the identifier, in the IANA tz database, for the tzdb
  zone I'm in happens to have, in sequence, the characters 'A', "m',
  'e', 'r', 'i', 'c', 'a', '/', 'L', 'o', 's', '_', 'A', 'n', 'g', 'e',
  'l', 'e', and 's' is irrelevant; the set of strings used for tzdb zone
  identifiers is *not* to be used as a set of cities to offer an end
  user!

  Please find a machine running OS X, fire up "System Preferences",
  select the "Date & Time" item, and select the "Time Zone" pane in that
  item, for an example of how a time zone selector *should* work.  It's
  similar to what Ubuntu 15.04 offers, but:

      1) it uses OS X's location services (Core Location, etc.) to try
  to find out where you're located, using, I think, Skyhook - you could
  perhaps use GeoClue for this;

      2) instead of a "Location" box into which you can type stuff
  without an obvious effect, it offers a drop-down list of cities near
  the location where you've placed the "you are here" blob - the map
  display in OS X has "geonames.org" on it, so that might be where it
  gets the list of nearby cities;

      3) you can type in that box, and if it finds a matching city,
  it'll move the "you are here" blob there (sadly, I tried typing "Weed"
  into it, but it failed to find Weed, CA, although it could find
  Tustin, Oxnard, Union City, and Redding).

  OS X also lets you run in a mode where it uses the location services
  to continuously update the current tzdb zone for the system, but
  *that* required a fair bit of chainsaw work on localtime.c (I'm told
  by somebody who should know that the notify(3) mechanism in OS X was
  originally created to allow a running process to be informed that it
  needs to change the current time zone, so even a dumb program in a for
  loop doing "sleep(10)" followed by "now = time(NULL)" followed by
  "printf("%s", ctime(&now));" will see the change - in fact, it just
  *did*).

  So please at least stop using the list of tzdb names as a list of
  cities to show to the user; tzdb identifiers are really *not*
  something that should be exposed to the vast majority of users (they
  should be exposed only to nerds).  The tzdb maintainers will thank
  you, as this should significantly reduce the number of users who
  complain that the tzdb's choice of city to use in the identifier is
  inappropriate because it's not their city, or it's not the most
  important city, or whatever.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.04
  Package: unity-control-center 15.04.0+15.04.20150410-0ubuntu1
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.19.0-22.22-generic 3.19.8-ckt1
  Uname: Linux 3.19.0-22-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.1
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: Unity
  Date: Wed Jul 22 17:42:47 2015
  ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/unity-control-center
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-06-03 (48 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" - Release amd64 (20150422)
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, user)
   SHELL=/bin/bash
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   LANGUAGE=en_US
   XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
  SourcePackage: unity-control-center
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
  usr_lib_unity-control-center: deja-dup 32.0-0ubuntu5

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