Timezones, clock applet and marketing dangers
March 23, 2008
It is great to receive feedback from users that try out the development versions of distributions (such as Ubuntu and Fedora). Usually, these are small bugs that can easily get fixed. However, there is this bug that looks potent to lead to political dissatisfaction and bad publicity to GNOME.
The clock applet (gnome-panel) now shows the timezones of cities that one selects. You click on the Edit button, you select the city (it comes from Locations.xml – libgweather, which has the coordinates of each city entry), and the applet makes a guess of what is your timezone (each timezone comes with longitude information).
So, if a city is far away from the capital city of your country (and closer to the capital city of a neighboring country), then the applet often proposes the wrong timezone. Considering that in some (=many) cases there is some animosity between neighboring countries, this makes users unhappy.
Launchpad bug report: Bug #185190, Clock applet chooses wrong timezone for many cities (eg Pittsburgh, Beijing)
GNOME Bugzilla bug report: Bug 519823 – Cities associated with wrong timezone
Updated (8Apr2008): The bug has been fixed upstream (thanks Dan!) and most likely makes it in GNOME 2.22.1, which means Ubuntu 8.04 and other distributions will get the update as well. Some countries with regions that have more than one timezone may want to check that the correct timezone is selected for each region.
