490931 - When displaying timezone options in General Preferences, include their offset from GMT

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: User Accounts, enhancement)

Description

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Most applications, when they display the timezone options available to a user, include their offset from GMT, like America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00) or something like that. This was pointed out in pyrzak's students' research as a possibly confusing issue for people.

In fact, we might want to <optgroup> timezones by their offset? I'm not sure.

Comment 1

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Attachment: v1

Well, here's a patch that does it, but performance is REALLY BAD. So until we can find a performant way to do this, we'll just have to skip it.

Comment 2

[Emmanuel Seyman]

Wouldn't it make sense to cache this info (every time checksetup.pl is run, for example) ? I don't see this information changing a lot.

Comment 3

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Wouldn't it make sense to cache this info (every time checksetup.pl is run, for
> example) ? I don't see this information changing a lot.

  Yeah, that would probably make sense, actually. That's a good idea. We could just generate a template file.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

I don't want to make the code too complex and have a perf impact for such a minor thing. People know where they live, so the confusion should be minimal. IMO, if we cannot get it easily from DateTime::TimeZone, we shouldn't impact Buugzilla perf with this.