Time and Date: Can't add location

[Scott Severance]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Click clock on Unity panel and choose "Time & Date Settings..."
2. On the clock tab, hit "Choose Locations."
3. Try to add a location. Possibly fail and get an error icon. Locations known to fail (all in the US): Albuquerque, Denver (even though there's a time zone called "America/Denver"), Chicago (even though "America/Chicago" is the name of a time zone).
4. Try to enter a time zone name: America/Denver. It also fails with the same error icon.
5. Try some random small town such as Moriarty, New Mexico or Mount Pleasant, Texas. It works.
6. Dig the data source URL out of the source: "http://geoname-lookup.ubuntu.com/?query=%s&release=%s&lang=%s". It returns the expected data for all cases tried.

I've reproduced this bug in three Natty environments: the live USB, a fresh install, and an upgraded machine.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

Hmm, this seems to work for me. I can type in Denver or Chicago and get results. Are you perhaps not waiting long enough to get results?

[Scott Severance (scott.severance)]

I'm waiting long enough (> 10 times as long as the wait for other results).

When I tried again today, mysteriously, Chicago worked. However, Denver mostly didn't work. Once, after I'd typed "Den", "Denver (US)" appeared in a new dropdown menu containing only that one entry that replaced the menu currently showing. Adding a "v" caused that "Denver" to disappear and I haven't managed to get it back. So, with one single odd exception, Denver isn't working for me.

I don't know if this is relevant, but I'm located in Korea. Every Natty machine I've used here experiences this same bug.

I've worked around this issue by using dconf-editor to manually add entries.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

Hmm, Korea shouldn't be a big deal, but it contacting a server in the UK. But, we'd like it to work in Korea as well. Could you try running the preferences from the command line and see if there are any error messages?

[Scott Severance (scott.severance)]

When running from the command line, here's what happened.

I hit the button to add a new location (Denver). As soon as I typed the *first* letter, the following message appeared:

** (indicator-datetime-preferences:25158): WARNING **: Could not connect to geoname lookup server: Operation was cancelled

Typing additional letters produced no further messages. After I'd completed *slowly* typing "Denver" and waited quite some time for the menu to appear (it didn't), I decided to re-try Chicago. I deleted all text from the box and got the following message:

** (indicator-datetime-preferences:25158): WARNING **: Could not parse geoname JSON data

I started slowly typing "Chicago." By mistake, I first typed "Chu" and got an appropriate dropdown. I then backspaced and finished typing "Chicago" correctly, this time typing quickly. After each character the operation canceled error (identical to the one pasted above) was printed. But Chicago didn't work. There was a menu of other cities matching the pattern but not including Chicago. When there were no more such cities, the dropdown disappeared.

Finally, I typed in "Mount Pleasant" and selected "Mount Pleasant (Texas)" from the menu. The following messages appeared:

(indicator-datetime-preferences:25158): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_entry_set_text: assertion `GTK_IS_ENTRY (entry)' failed

(indicator-datetime-preferences:25158): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_editable_set_position: assertion `GTK_IS_EDITABLE (editable)' failed

(indicator-datetime-preferences:25158): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid (NULL) pointer instance

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

Hello Scott,

The indicator-datetime preferences has been rewritten for Oneiric and now is part of the control center. After some testing seems that this bug was already fixed.
If you want to test, run "gnome-control-center indicator-datetime" in the command line

Feel free to reopen the bug if this is still a problem for you.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Eric TF Bat (bat-flurf)]

Javier - I'm using Oneiric. The problem persists. London is not part of England, allegedly, although South London ("London South East") is. For a while there, there was no such place as Los Angeles, but now it's back and it brought lots of friends.

I am frankly dubious of your claim that testing occurred.

[Scott Severance (scott.severance)]

I've tested this in Oneiric. The problem persists as in my original report, except that fewer messages are printed on the console.

[JImbo (mrjameslott)]

I have the same issue. I have from terminal and i get no messages. Oddly i do get some locations in the dropdown but they only seem to be ones with accents or no uk english characters (sorry dont know the names of things)

I attach a screen of trying to type Melbourne. I get to "m..e". The dropdown has none without non latin characters.

[Olli Ries (ories)]

I am confirming the reported behavior from comment #4

[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop ISO of the development release - Trusty Tahr. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for indicator-datetime (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Indicator Date and Time because there has been no activity for 60 days.]