I, too, thought all the timezone info was a little bit drawn out at
install.  Of course, I'm a meteorologist who is quite used to dealing with
only one time zone--GMT.  Any way to perform the install to GMT, then
allow users to diddle with the locality issues later?  Besides, my mac is
a rotten timekeeper in any timezone!

					Kevin

On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, David A. Gatwood wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Colin Wood wrote:
> 
> > Michael G. Schabert wrote:
> > > >:-)  Of course, what happens to the poor schmuck in Antarctica who
> > > >installs NetBSD on his machine and finds that he can't find the
> > > >appropriate timezone files?
> > > 
> > > But _why_ do we need so many darn files when there are exactly 24 time
> > > zones????? Even if we had 24 "regular" and 24 "DST" it would be much easier.
> > 
> > You would think that there are only 24 timezones, but there aren't.  Due
> > to the brilliance of local governments, there are quite a few oddities out
> > there.  For example, in the US, I don't think that Arizona obeys DST, so
> 
> Arizona (or maybe just Phoenix?) and part of Indiana... the part that's in
> Eastern time, I think....  Still, if there were 48, 24 of which had a
> daylight savings shift and 24 of which didn't -- which I think was the
> original suggestion, right? -- that would cover all but the strangest
> (i.e. changing on a different day or whatever)....  It seems to me that 49
> files for Europe alone is, in all likelihood, severe overkill.
> 
> Where I disagree with you is when you say that they're all necessary.... 
> There's a separate entry for Los Angeles... since when is LA not in
> Pacific time?  And Chicago (Central)... and Louisville (Central)... New
> York, Detroit, Boise, Denver... the list goes on.  Maybe a couple of those
> cities have something weird about their time zones, but most of the files
> are identical to a file in US (frequently hard links, even).  That's not
> counting America/Indianapolis and America/Indiana/Indianapolis.  The fact
> that many of them are hard links keeps them from taking up space, but they
> still waste lots of install time for no apparent reason.
> 
> > it needs a separate one.  All of Russia is one hour behind normal
> > timezones IIRC.  There are a number of other little exceptions here and
> > there :-)
> 
> That means the Russian zones still qualify as an offset of a given number
> of hours from GMT (with or w/o DST, whatever).
> 
> 
> Thoughts?
> David