I have carried out a review of the existing timezone setting menu, and it is apparent that a number of changes are required to reflect changes that have occurred to individual territories' timezone rules. I have identified each change in a separate commit, for ease of review.
It is likely that in coming years, there will be changes in DST arrangements both in Europe and North America. In this case further changes will be required.
At present, Squeezeplay offers up timezones in a menu that is organized by GMT offset, with a few indicative applicable place names. I have not seen any adverse comments, so I guess it works well enough for the user base. But more place names may be required if changes in DST are not applied uniformly. Or perhaps one might identify sensible timezone acronyms.
A full 'Olson format' approach might be easier to maintain in future, because it would require less maintenance for future timezone rule changes. In this scenario, the timezone menu would, essentially, browse the file system for the user to make a direct choice. But the Olson format is defined in English, so some additional translation would be polite. Possibly Debian/Ubuntu might offer a suggestion on how this might be efficiently achieved.
This PR has been raised in conjunction with https://github.com/ralph-irving/squeezeos/pull/17, Update timezone data, and is intended to bring the timezone data in Squeezeplay up to date.
I have carried out a review of the existing timezone setting menu, and it is apparent that a number of changes are required to reflect changes that have occurred to individual territories' timezone rules. I have identified each change in a separate commit, for ease of review.
The last change: Timezone changes - Adopt canonical olson timezone references is perhaps a bit pedantic, and perhaps should be removed.
It is likely that in coming years, there will be changes in DST arrangements both in Europe and North America. In this case further changes will be required.
At present, Squeezeplay offers up timezones in a menu that is organized by GMT offset, with a few indicative applicable place names. I have not seen any adverse comments, so I guess it works well enough for the user base. But more place names may be required if changes in DST are not applied uniformly. Or perhaps one might identify sensible timezone acronyms.
A full 'Olson format' approach might be easier to maintain in future, because it would require less maintenance for future timezone rule changes. In this scenario, the timezone menu would, essentially, browse the file system for the user to make a direct choice. But the Olson format is defined in English, so some additional translation would be polite. Possibly Debian/Ubuntu might offer a suggestion on how this might be efficiently achieved.