lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/31/2011 09:00 PM, Benny Hult wrote:

> ..., I think there's really no need for time zones.

This comes back to use cases...

Phill, why are people wanting TZ info on WhoWeAre?  What are the likely
uses that will be made of it?  In practice, if this is intended for real
time online communication, wouldn't something more useful be a column
headed say

  "Usually on #lubuntu between"

which might have entries like

  M-F: 0300-0700 UTC, Sa-Sun: 0200-0800 UTC

or whatever?

> Like most of you guys seems to live at night from my point of view
> (which is a normal point of view ;).

Most of us live continuously (few of us die and resurrect every day!).
I think we often work or are at school during the day time, and so we
have fun playing with computers (with Ubuntu and Lubuntu) during
non-daytime.  Isn't that "normal"? :)

> And UTC is changed twice a year, there's winter time and summer time
> (daylight saving) and it requires editing to keep it up-to-date.

Right.  Linux, Lubuntu and Launchpad all store TZ info as the usual
(standard?) strings representing a relative path to a tzfile under
/usr/share/zoneinfo/, like America/Los_Angeles or Europe/Berlin, and not
as a UTC offset.  Given one of those strings, a trivial

  TZ=:America/Los_Angeles date +%z

will display the offset from UTC in your local bash shell, and it will
be correct in both summer and winter :)

Now, for maximum information correctness with minimum end-user effort,
we just need the GPS in a cellphone to communicate with its owners
laptop, so as they travel, the laptop knows and sets its current local
timezone automatically ... and maybe, even, the laptop then auto-updates
the owner's LP timezone entry whenever its TZ changes and the laptop has
an Internet connection :) :) :)

But even then, we would still have to return to the question of who will
*use* the TZ info on LP (or on WhoWeAre), for what purposes :)

Jonathan