Setting the time zone.

[Hakan Koseoglu]

On 6 September 2010 01:31, Michael <mmorse757 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Somewhere up thread, some one made the comment that Gnome was geared
> toward people that are less than average in intelligence or something in
> that vein.  I must say that whether it is Microsoft or the folks at
> Gnome, I hate when software tries to "think" for me.
>
> Standard time zones are usally written in the format  GMT -0500 or
> something really similar.  So, I just don't understand why this isn't
> the format being used, irregardless as to whether or not what is
> actually being used is "easy to figure out" or not.  Why re-invent the
> wheel?
Although you are correct, GMT values do not take care of summer time.
Countries/states on the same GMT zone can have different summer times.
Hence it is easier to use a more specific value to set the data. If
everything was static, there would be no need to get updates to
timezone data so often. See the following changelog covering only the
last couple of months below. Most people at least know the nearest
major city or state they're in.

If you're using the command 'dpkg-reconfigure tzdata', you can
actually select one of the GMT values as your time zone without a
problem.

In UK, normally we have the time zone GMT, during summer time we have
the time zone BST (British Summer Time, GMT+1). It's much easier to
say "I'm near London" and let the system handle the complexities.

tzdata (2010l-0ubuntu0.10.04) lucid-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release 2010l: (LP: #623630)
    - Egypt: Update DST rules (effective from Aug 11)
    - Palestine: Update DST rules (effective from Aug 11)
  * gl.po: updated Galician translation from Jorge Barreiro
    (thanks Clint Adams)

 -- Gary Lasker <gary.lasker at canonical.com>  Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:48:17 -0400

tzdata (2010k-0ubuntu0.10.04) lucid-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release 2010k: (LP: #613691)
    - Egypt: Update DST rules (effective from August 10)
    - Finland: Update historic DST rules
    - Micronesia: Zone name changes

 -- Gary Lasker <gary.lasker at canonical.com>  Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:34:34 -0400

tzdata (2010j-0ubuntu0.10.04) lucid-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release 2010j: (LP: #582529)
    - America/Bahia_Banderas: Add new time zone
  * en.po: rename "Noronha" to "Fernando de Noronha"
    and "Ponape" to "Pohnpei" (thanks Clint Adams)
  * de.po: updated German translation from Holger Wansing
    (thanks Clint Adams)
  * debian/control: update maintainer fields

 -- Gary Lasker <gary.lasker at canonical.com>  Wed, 02 Jun 2010 11:18:02 -0400


-- 
Hakan (m1fcj) - http://www.hititgunesi.org