529774 - Europe/Ljubljana (and others) missing in timezone list

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Bugzilla :: User Accounts, defect)

Description

[David Balažic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 

In users General Preferences [1], in the selection "Timezone used to display dates and times" some timezones are missing, like:
Europe/Ljubljana
Europe/Zagreb

[1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

According to the perldoc for DateTime::TimeZone, and feeding it the data from  RHEL5's tzdata package, those two names are both deprecated.  They were both replaced by Europe/Belgrade.

That said, the DateTime::TimeZone module does provide a way to retrieve all the deprecated names and map them to the current ones...  Maybe we should include them all in the list, since people may be used to them?

DateTime::TimeZone->links returns a hash with the deprecated names as keys and the new names as the values.

Comment 2

[David Balažic]

>  those two names are both deprecated.  They were both replaced by Europe/Belgrade.


Huh!?

That like saying Europe/London was deprecated and replaced by Europe/Paris.

Every other European capital city is in the list.

Is this some political thing???

Comment 3

[Frédéric Buclin]

We take the list provided by DateTime::TimeZone, which is an external Perl module. I don't see why we need one item per city, really. For instance, there is no Europe/Bern despite it's the capital of Switzerland, and I don't cry. Being Paris, London or Bern, we all live in the same timezone.

Comment 4

[David Balažic]

Fine. Them have one "CET" entry for most of Europe, I don't care.

But if you* use cities, then I expect a reason for why a 5% of them are removed and the other left.

* - not you personally

Comment 5

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Attachment: TimeZone old name -> new name map

Just for reference, here's the list of old-name to new-name mappings for timezone names that have been deprecated or renamed, as returned by DateTime::TimeZone->links().

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I think a lot of it has to do with who has what rules in common, also.  (Hypothetically) Amsterdam may be listed separately from Paris because France changes their Daylight Savings on a different date than the Netherlands does, where Berlin might use the same rules as Paris, and wouldn't need to be listed separately.  (Just a hypothetical example, I don't know anything about what those cities have in common and haven't looked to see which ones are valid).

Comment 7

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

(In reply to comment #4)
The explanation is in the "Theory" file that comes with the Olson Timezone Database (the "tzdata" package, on most systems). This is the standard timezone database used by all *nix-based operating systems these days, and really should probably be the standard for all OSes.

There's a bit of information about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoneinfo

No further discussion of this *with us the Bugzilla developers*, who have nothing to do with it, is necessary.

Comment 8

[David Balažic]

The Theory file also says:

This naming convention is not intended for use by inexperienced users
to select TZ values by themselves (though they can of course examine
and reuse existing settings).  Distributors should provide
documentation and/or a simple selection interface that explains the
names; see the 'tzselect' program supplied with this distribution for
one example.

So Dave's idea should be used (or something similar)