dx-packages team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There are two separate issues here: choosing the time zone as an item in
the first place, and displaying it in the menu once it’s chosen.

For choosing the time zone as an item, you can already do that with UTC,
because we made sure “UTC” is special-cased as something you can search
for. In theory, we could do the same with all the time zone names, and
first-letter abbreviations of all the time zone names: no dialog, just
make them options in the menu.

Right now, though, there is nothing in Ubuntu that knows the names or
abbreviations of any other time zones — because the time zone database
we use (tzdata) doesn’t contain them. It contains information about all
the daylight saving changes for a zone called “America/New_York”, going
back to 1918 … but it can’t tell you that when in daylight saving, the
“America/New_York” zone is called EDT. We would have to start
maintaining a parallel database that mapped tzdata zone names, in and
out of daylight saving, to their common abbreviations. Common names
would be even harder because they’d need translating into multiple
languages.

For displaying the time zone in the menu once it’s chosen, multiple time
zones with the same abbreviation is not actually a problem. As shown in
this screenshot, it’s already the case that you can add multiple cities
with the same name and they aren’t distinguished. We trust that either
you won’t do that, or that you’ll know which is which. The same could be
true for time zone abbreviations.

** Attachment added: "menu showing multiple cities with the same name"
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-datetime/+bug/1577414/+attachment/4661363/+files/1577414-menu-times.png

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1577414

Title:
  Adding time zones to locations of indicator-datetime

Status in indicator-datetime package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Dear all,

  May I suggest the feature to add time zones, e.g. CEST, EDT, directly
  to the very useful locations menu?

  Currently only city names are supported.

  I am attaching two screenshots:

  1. showing the locations menu
  2. a mockup of how I envision the time zone to be represented in the indicator

  Thankfully,

  ~Robert

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