Time zone selection is really weird

[Michael Zanetti]

The time zone selection in the settings app is really weird:

It asks me to enter my current location which already seems odd.
=> I try Blaustein, no results
=> I try Ulm, which is the closest next bigger city, no results
=> I try Berlin, as that seems to be a known city for time zone settings, suddenly I 12 results for Berlin, each them being a tiny part of the city where I've never heard the name of. Which one should I select? They're all the same in terms of time zone, aren't they?

IMO, the settings app should have a list of predefined timezones like pretty much any other device has, means having entries like

Europe Helsinki
Europe Berlin/Amsterdam/Rome
Europe London/Lisbon
etc

The textfield on top should then filter the entries...

In any case, if we want to have the selection based on the user's real location, we need to have a database including *all* cities, perhaps even villages. If not, 1 entry per time zone should be enough.

I for one would prefer the 1 entry per time zone, with their commonly known names.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, what device/ubuntu version do you use? "Ulm" is listed/returns result on bq rtm and on desktop vivid here...

The list of cities used is /usr/share/libtimezonemap/ui/cities15000.txt from libtimezonemap, having every city on earth listed would means a load of data, handling the current list is already slow enough...

That seems like something for design to give input on, the current description on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeAndDate#Phone.2BAC8-tablet is not detailled, but it's nice to be able to type city names

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The selection of cities in tzdata has long been a source of frustration: see for example bug 113718, bug 179885, bug 337330, bug 344348, bug 996853, and bug 997737. Ubuntu developers understandably defer to the upstream maintainers, because, whoa, geopolitics. But the end result is that we end up with a strange list, where cities show up multiple times or don't show up at all.

We could, perhaps, filter the list to remove redundant items. Unfortunately your suggestion of one entry per time zone wouldn't work, because the biggest city in your time zone may be very far away. For example, if you're in Houston Texas, the biggest city in your time zone is Chicago Illinois, 1500 kilometres away.

I assume that the 12 results you got were:
Berlin Reinickendorf
Berlin Pankow
Berlin Koepenick
Bernau bei Berlin
Berlin
Berlin Mitte
Berlin Steglitz Zehlendorf
Berlin Wilmersdorf
Berlin Spandau
Berlin Tempelhof
Berlin Schoeneberg
Berlin Treptow

Of these, "Berlin" is listed as "PPLC" ("capital of a political entity"), while the others are all "PPLX" ("section of populated place"). <http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html>

So if this is a reproducible problem, maybe we could filter out any PPLX or PPL item when -- and only when -- there is a PPLC that (a) has the same named time zone and (b) is within a given latitude+longitude of it.

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

Sebastien, yes, Ulm is indeed there, but hidden way down the list because there's a lot of other cities that have "ulm" in the name. I just missed it in the noise.

Matthew: Living in central Europe, whenever I set up a timezone in a device, I usually do this: I search for "Europe" which then usually brings a list with:

Europe (London/Lisbon)
Europe (Amsterdam/Berlin/Rome)
Europe (Helsinki/Bucharest)

Not sure what's the correct way forward here, as Sebastien has valid arguments too. I still think the current huge list is not the ideal solution and I for one would probably still prefer one entry per time zone and continent. So that for example UTC can be found by:

Europe (London/Lisbon)
Africa (Casablanca/Ivory coast)

This picture does it pretty much as I'd expect: http://i.imgur.com/rwi3XSJ.png

It doesn't have all the cities in there, but it doesn't need to. Instead it would be much better to have a smaller set of entries and actually sorted by timezone (not by city name).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

@Michael, there is bug #1362134 about the relevance of the ranking, if that was fixed it would probably make the experience better (you would still have noise for e.g "ulm" but having the result that matters first would remove most of the annoyance I think)

[Walter (wdoekes)]

Agreed. I tried Europe first, before I searched for Amsterdam. And when selecting that, I saw that it had properly converted that to the appropriate "Europe/Amsterdam".

If we're configuring time, it should IMO not ask for location, but for a timezone, which is Europe/Amsterdam. I don't want to tell my phone where I live, I only want it to switch to/from daylight savings correctly, nothing else.

Thanks.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Michael, I appreciate that you've walked us through the steps you've followed in uncovering all these issues. Unfortunately, that makes this bug report not useful for development -- it covers six separate issues, which will very likely have different resolutions, and which, even if all fixed, probably would be fixed in different branches at different times. In other words, one bug per bug report please.

(A) That the time zone selection asks you for your current location is bug 1351534.
(B) That the list of locations doesn't include Blaustein is a separate issue, probably Invalid as Sebastien explained.
(C) That Ulm is buried below eight irrelevant results I have reported as bug 1454186.
(D) That "Berlin" returns 12 results I have reported as bug 1454195.
(E) Listing time zones rather than locations should be reported as a separate proposal listing benefits and drawbacks.
(F) Typing "Europe" to get all the European time zones should be reported as a separate proposal listing benefits and drawbacks. (When you do, please be more specific about what kind of devices already do that, since they would not include devices running Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu for PC, Android, iOS, or Windows Phone.)