Bug in i18n timezones (was Re: [Zope3-Users] obtaining time zone from http request)

[Gary Poster]

On Aug 29, 2005, at 7:18 PM, Alen Stanisic wrote:

> On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 09:50 -0400, Gary Poster wrote:
>
>> And FWIW, once you get your browser settings correct, for the
>> timezone part of the locale database, en-* is all the same--that is,
>> if my locale is en-US, I get all en* locations (including Casablanca,
>> Tokyo, and other interesting locations). :-)  I think you will too.
>
> Correct, I get exactly the same locations (EST, LA, Casablanca,
> Tokyo, ...) with en-US or en-AU locale, and no Australian locations??

You know, I was about to write back and say, hey, don't blame us,  
it's those crazy Unicode people: http://unicode.org/cldr/data/common/ 
main/ .  We are using their database.

Then, when I was looking up how to submit bug reports to the  
database, I saw this on http://www.unicode.org/cldr/ 
filing_bug_reports.html : """Similarly, the timezones for different  
regions are to be derived from Olson data, and are not in the locale  
data.""".

It seems we are supposed to be getting our i18n timezone data,  
mapping country code to timezone name, from the Olson database.  AU,  
for instance, gets this much more reasonable list from the current  
Olson database's 'zone.tab' file:

AU      -3133+15905     Australia/Lord_Howe     Lord Howe Island
AU      -4253+14719     Australia/Hobart        Tasmania - most  
locations
AU      -3956+14352     Australia/Currie        Tasmania - King Island
AU      -3749+14458     Australia/Melbourne     Victoria
AU      -3352+15113     Australia/Sydney        New South Wales -  
most locations
AU      -3157+14127     Australia/Broken_Hill   New South Wales -  
Yancowinna
AU      -2728+15302     Australia/Brisbane      Queensland - most  
locations
AU      -2016+14900     Australia/Lindeman      Queensland - Holiday  
Islands
AU      -3455+13835     Australia/Adelaide      South Australia
AU      -1228+13050     Australia/Darwin        Northern Territory
AU      -3157+11551     Australia/Perth Western Australia

If you are interested, the columns four are ISO 3166 2-character  
country code, latitude and longitude of the zone's principal  
location, zone name, and comments, respectively.

I was also personally happy to see that en-US does not include Tokyo  
or Casablanca.

I'd say this is a bug: we should be including the Olson zone.tab file  
in with our 18n data and getting our timezone names from it.  Moving  
this to the Zope 3 dev list now for discussion there.

Stephan, do you have any concerns about incorporating the Olson  
information in 18n?  I suppose another approach would be to see if  
Stuart would be willing to have pytz grow this mapping, and have the  
i18n package depend on pytz.  I'd actually prefer that, if you and  
Stuart agreed and were willing, since he already has his automatic  
processing of the Olson database, and is already keeping up with the  
Olson releases.

Gary