Re: Not sure about recent change in tzsetup

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

(I'll be dropping private CCs from further replies unless you request them)

On Friday 13 November 2009, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Not anymore. With the version of localechooser in SVN and at medium
> > priority you can select:
> > - English
> > - Germany
> > - Additional locale en_GB.UTF-8
> > - Default locale  en_GB.UTF-8
> > And you will automatically get the correct timezone.
>
> Do you not think this is an unreasonably complicated way to specify
> things?

No, I don't. But see below.

> To be perfectly honest, this seems to me like a classic example of an
> interface designed by people familiar with the underlying
> implementation.

IMO requiring users to choose England while they live in Germany because 
they want en_GB just as much requires them to be aware of the underlying 
implementation. As long as the instructions in the dialogs guide users to 
make the correct choices I don't see a major problem. And that is exactly 
what's been improved with the recent revision of dialogs in localechooser.

> Users should never have to see "en_GB.UTF-8", and having to navigate
> around "additional locales" and "default locales" is too convoluted.

I can agree with that up to some point. However, I feel that most users 
probably don't have a clue as to what the exact impact of locales is 
anyway. And requiring them to be aware of the subtle differences when 
asked to select "their country" is IMO a lot to ask.

Perhaps we could further improve localechooser in that respect by reusing 
the shortlist questions to ask what country they'd prefer for localization 
if they selected "other" the first time around. That could be a relatively 
cheap solution.

So you'd get:
Language: English
In which country do you live: Germany

And then at default prio something like (wording needs improvement):
    You have selected English as language and Germany as country.
    There is no locale defined for that combination. 

    Preferred country to base default locale settings on:
		<shortlist>

It should even be possible to dynamically hack the choices list to display 
the locale after the country name, so you'd get e.g:
                Australia (en_AU.UTF-8)
		United Kingdom (en_GB.UTF-8)
		United States (en_US.UTF-8)

> > That has never been the intention though.
>
> I think you must mean "That has never been my intention" - please don't
> speak for other folks who've contributed to localechooser (including
> myself).

I think my comment was justified based on:
- country has always been used to select default mirror country, which only
  makes sense if it's the country you live in
- country *has* always been used for determination of time zone, which
  again only makes sense if it's the country you live in

You may not agree with that, but IMNSHO that combination does clearly 
signify past intend, at least by the people who designed tzsetup and 
choose-mirror.