Re: Not sure about recent change in tzsetup
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 11:01:09AM +0100, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Thursday 12 November 2009, Colin Watson wrote:
> > No it doesn't. If there's only one choice for the timezone, then you get
> > a medium-priority question asking you to confirm your current time, as
> > before. The only difference is that this question is now more useful,
> > because it gives you the option of bailing out and selecting a different
> > timezone when d-i's default is wrong. I did not change any question
> > priorities.
> >
> > In some ways it is suboptimal to offer this facility only at medium
> > priority just because the country you selected only has one timezone,
> > but I didn't want to add an extra question.
>
> Right, and this means that you introduce a significant inconsistency in the
> functionality offered to users installing at default prio who happen to
> select a country with multiple time zones versus a single time zone.
It's an inconsistency, but not all inconsistencies are worse than
nothing. Besides, it's not as if the extra question you're relying on
for your argument in localechooser is asked outside expert mode ...
Actually, personally I think that it wouldn't hurt to promote
tzsetup/selected to high priority. It was medium at least in part
because it didn't offer any additional flexibility, but now it does.
> My viewpoint is that you're solving the problem in the wrong place. The
> problem was a limitation in localechooser, which is now resolved.
I don't agree that you have resolved this adequately. Any interface that
involves innocent (non-expert) users having locale strings inflicted on
them is not really fit for purpose.
I'm also not particularly happy with the obvious alternative, which is
effectively to ask the country question twice with slightly different
semantics. The only purpose for asking which country you live in (as
opposed to which country's localisation conventions you want) is to
select an appropriate timezone; as such, this operation logically fits
in tzsetup, not in localechooser. Furthermore, we should just get on
with it and let the user choose the right timezone rather than making
them jump through hoops by selecting the right country followed by the
right timezone.
At least if this all lives in tzsetup it's trivial to go back and
forward if you make a mistake. Artificially splitting it up between
localechooser and tzsetup makes it awkward for the user to do so (when
you find yourself wanting to add template text telling the user to go
back to the main menu and select a different item there in order to get
the option you want, it's a good sign that you've probably made a design
error).
In addition, localechooser is memory-constrained (since it lives in the
initrd) in a way that tzsetup is not so much. As such, I'd have thought
you'd be in favour of moving things *out* of localechooser when
possible. Shoving all this stuff into localechooser is going to make it
even more hideously complicated than it already is.
> I'm currently considering the following additional changes:
> - revert your patch: with localechooser in SVN it's no longer needed
I don't want to get into a revert war. Please do me a favour and don't
start one ... This attitude really frustrates me.
> - apply my patch to allow selection of UTC at medium priority
Again, I think that special-casing UTC is missing the point.
> - add a para to the description of time/zone saying something like:
> "If the desired time zone is not listed, then please go back to
> the step "Choose language" and select a country that uses the
> desired time zone (the country where you live or are located)."
Going back this far in the installer doesn't really work all that
nicely. I recommend against this. In any case, this is unreasonable -
it's asking the user to take manual action when the installer could just
let them do what they want (the equivalent of saying "please run this
command to recover" rather than just doing it).
I do not think that it particularly helps users to insist that they be
aware of and honour a tight binding between countries and time zones in
order to make their computer keep the right time. We should be more
flexible than that. Good user interfaces let the user do what they need
to do rather than making them read the software's mind up-front and
effectively punishing them by sending them back through convoluted
channels when they fail to do so.
Regards,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: