On 2025-12-03 10:41, John Hawkinson wrote:
More generally, labels like "Indian/Mauritius" should not be exposed to users
unfamiliar with the naming
scheme....
I do not understand why we persist in pretending this is true when we know it
is not!
I wrote "users unfamiliar with the naming scheme" not "end users". An
application does these users a real disservice if it merely shows labels
without any further advice or documentation. Such an application cannot
be expected to work well.
It is kind of offensive, also, to James, given that he wrote:
| This creates misunderstandings when scheduling international
| meetings, especially on platforms like Zoom, Google Calendar, and
| others that rely directly on IANA time zone identifiers.
Are we really telling James that he is supposed to go change Google Calendar.
AND Zoom?
He shouldn't need to. I just now tried both applications, and neither
showed me "Indian/Mauritius" among my selections. Google Calendar's menu
had an entry "(GMT+04:00) Mauritius Standard Time". Zoom's menu didn't
list Mauritius so I suppose users are expected to select its "(GMT+4:00)
Dubai" or "(GMT+4:00) Muscat" or "(GMT+4:00) Baku, Tbilisi, Yerevan"
entries - not the best UI but it's not TZDB's problem. Although there
may be other parts of those applications where users can enter raw TZDB
labels, it's still good advice to do that sort of thing only if you know
what you're doing.
I agree that too many systems ask naive users to use TZDB labels.
However, this doesn't mean we should get into the business of
maintaining lots (and there will be lots) of aliases to minimize pain
for these naive users. That's beyond our capacity and expertise, and
CLDR is a better home for that sort of thing.
some people use tzselect but other people still have to manipulate symbolic
links to /etc/localtime
The vast majority of users do neither. They use a graphical interface
that uses either a map or localized names. Yes, expert users need to
know TZDB labels, but they don't need further aliases to do their jobs.
