timezone map no longer allows reliable selection of the correct zone

[Steve Langasek]

In precise, when I click on the "Time & Date Settings" from the datetime indicator, I'm presented with a timezone map. Clicking in the general area of Iowa/Illinois, US, which is firmly in the US/Central timezone, results in "Vincennes" being selected as my timezone - which is wrong, Vincennes is in Eastern time and the highlighted region is clearly not where my mouse pointer was! moving slightly to the left and clicking again, while staying in the right area for the Central timezone, I now get "Denver" selected, which is one timezone to the WEST of what should be selected. If I move my mouse up into Minnesota and click, I get "Rainy River", which is in the right general timezone but in the wrong country ( == DST rules are not guaranteed to be the same). Clicking again at the same point does no good - it does not cycle through the cities in this timezone band, only continues to present me with the same wrong zone.

By trial and error, moving the cursor a pixel at a time and clicking again, I'm ultimately able to choose Chicago.

This UI is completely unusable. I know it didn't work this poorly in oneiric, so something seems to have regressed upstream.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: indicator-datetime 0.3.1-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.1.0-3.3-generic 3.1.0
Uname: Linux 3.1.0-3-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.26-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Nov 21 10:49:58 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: indicator-datetime
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2011-11-08 (12 days ago)

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Seb points out that the indicator-datetime hasn't changed since oneiric so this is not likely to be a regression. This is possible; on reflection, the last time I would have needed Central Time would have been in January, so I wasn't trying to select this timezone at all in oneiric, so maybe other timezones generally work better.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Benjamin Kerensa (bkerensa)]

I had the same issue when selecting California it gave me Vancouver so I tried other regions and in Europe it seems to work decently but just seems like U.S. is jumbled a bit.

[Bilal Akhtar (bilalakhtar)]

Its a bug in gnome-control-center, not indicator-datetime.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

There is a merge request on https://code.launchpad.net/~mterry/indicator-datetime/libtimezonemap/+merge/87927 to use libtimezonemap which should help to solve some of those issues

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

The branch to use libtimezonemap got included in precise. Does this work better for folks?

indicator-datetime (0.3.90-0ubuntu1) precise; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    * Still need to distribute these files even if we're not building it
    * Adding some extra ignore stuff in
    * Adding in code coverage calculation
    * Allow ccpanel to be optional
    * Move to use libtimezone map
    * Add a name hint on the indicator
    * Build fixes for updated dependencies
    * Fixing Geoclue support
  * debian/control:
    * Bumping libdbusmenu requirement to 0.5.90
    * Added dependency on libtimezonemap
  * debian/patches: Removed, all upstream.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Yes, thanks, I can find "Chicago" reliably now. It still doesn't allow cycling through related cities in the zone if I get it wrong, but that's a triaged bug in libtimezonemap that's targeted for beta-1.

The one remaining oddity I see is that when I click on US/Pacific, expecting to be given Los Angeles as the location name, I instead see "Portland" (with the pin located on LA, not Portland). I guess this is because I already have Portland configured as one of my timezones in the indicator, but curiously I don't see the same thing when clicking in US/Central, where I have Davenport, IA configured but still am shown Chicago.