Adding time zones to locations of indicator-datetime

I see two issues with using time zone abbreviations like this.

First, I think many more people know the name of a city in their time zone, than know the name of their time zone. For example, I lived in London for several years before learning that daylight savings time is called BST.

Second, there are many time zones that have the same abbreviation. For example, there are two time zones abbreviated “ACT”, two “ADT”, two “AMST”, two “AMT”, and two “AST”, and those are just the ones starting with A. <http://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/>

Dear Matthew,

Thanks for raising these two issues.

1. The use of time zones instead of city names is very common in meeting plannings. For instance, I receive frequent invitations to calls that are expressed in "16:00 EDT time". People in these meetings rarely refer to their location as a city.

2. This is a good point. Upon user input of, for instance ACT, could the system detect that there are two with the same name and ask the user to pick the correct one?

~Robert

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.

Dear Matthew,

Thanks a lot for your follow-up comment!

> 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.

The only open point I can read from your comment is actually this one.

How do you suggest to proceed? Would it be worthwhile maintaining a parallel database and what could the potential contribution of users look like to this project?

~Robert

Alas, I’m just a designer. For advice on that you’d need an engineer. :-)