More cities and GMT-style options in time zone selection

[deepad]

Title:
More cities and GMT-style options in time zone selection

Area:
posting

Summary:
The drop-down options right now to set your time zone offer an extremely limited number of Continent/City options to choose from. This should be increased and diversified to accomodate users from all parts of the world.

Description:
So in changing my time zone to get GMT + 5:30, I discovered that the only option I had was to select "Asia/Kolkata". No mention of Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore or any of the other big cities, and worse, no GMT option.

This requires people not living in the US to have to look up which of the small and randomly chosen list of cities their location matches in the time zone department.

So I would suggest that the system either be changed to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), or else if the present Continent/City one remains an option, make it Continent/Country for all nations that have one time zone. Or if Continent/City must be kept, add to the number of cities represented.

Poll #4509 More cities and GMT-style options in time zone selection

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 64

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
52 (81.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
8 (12.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (6.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[thorfinn]

Having a look at the dropdown - the cities list definitely comes "as is" from the UNIX zoneinfo system, which does not contain all cities that exist.

I don't think that expanding the list is a good idea, because zoneinfo is an operating system layer thing, and for maintainability, you really don't want to go adding your own list. It gets very messy doing that because DST start-end times are attached to that zone list.

I do think that:

The current zone offset should be added a prefix to the list entries (and the entries sorted by that zone offset, and any zones currently having DST should have a postfix indicator of that as well)

Either:

Entries should be added for fixed-from-GMT offset at 30 minute intervals (and these should not have DST ever)

Or there should be support for simply entering your own GMT offset, and that should also not have DST ever.

If you need to do DST, then you need to know specify what actual zone you're in, because the zoneinfo data keeps track of the various changes that can happen to DST start and end times. Either that or we wind up supporting entry of DST start-end... which is just a recipe for nightmares and badness. Zoneinfo keeps that data already... and for good reason, it should not be reimplemented.

[kyrielle]

I don't feel strongly about this but agree that either of these solutions could work. I think the second one (a list entry of "Specify GMT offset" and an edit box in which to do so) is probably less clutter for the users who don't want it / don't understand it, but either could work.

I don't want to see a ginormous list of every possible city/country ever; I don't want to see a separately-maintained list; I don't want to have to do my own GMT and time zone calculations when there's a perfectly good list; but I can see where the ability to specify a GMT offset could be useful.

And if there's a site or sites on the web that let you search by an address or a city name or whatever and spit out the time zone you want (preferably the zoneinfo one if that's what we're using), a helpful link to that might be, well, helpful.