Israel is not on the installer map

[serfus]

during the installation of ubuntu 11.10, on the 'where are you?' slide, there is no way of clicking on Israel on the map.

when clicking on the place where it is supposed to be, only 'Gaza (Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territory)' and 'Palestinian Territory, Occupied (Hebron)' shows.

screen prints on - http://www.inbarhovav.com/2011/12/blog-post_17.html.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

It's also very difficult (or impossible?) to click several other small countries (e.g. Belgium, Luxembourg, ...). Maybe the map can click through to a more detailed regional map (I think this was in the installer in the past, so this might be a regression?) which makes clicking the right country/timezone more easy?

In case of Belgium this is mostly just annoying (I can click it if I try 10 times or so, or I can search in the textbox below), but in the case serfus points to, this can have serious unintended political, economical & social side-effects, which makes it more important...

[serfus (serfus)]

like JanC mentioned, I am worried this might cause a big fuss in Israel and bring unwanted disputes.
as the Israeli contact, i really want to keep the LoCo free of politics and such.
so it's important for me that we can sort it all out before the release.

[Ronen (narkisr)]

I join Jan and serfus, this looks bad and definitely must be fixed soon as end users aren't always aware if bug are intentional or not

Ubuntu should be left out of politics

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'll have a look tomorrow, thanks. I can tell you authoritatively that this isn't intentional, though!

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

As a workaround, you should be able to type in a city name instead of clicking on the map.

[Ahmed Shams (ashams)]

@Ronen, Would you guys help on this by just spreading the word that there's no politics in this, no need to jump for guesses or causing fuss that can be harmful to the community without a big need, please? Thanks in Advance.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I've done some investigation here. I think the fix is beyond me, and I'd appreciate Evan's help here.

There does not appear to be a core problem with the data; the Asia/Jerusalem timezone is listed in libtimezonemap, if I use the TimezoneMap widget in isolation I can get it to return Asia/Jerusalem to me for certain x/y combinations, and instances of ubiquity.tz.Database know about Asia/Jerusalem.

However, it's no wonder that requiring absolutely pixel-perfect mouse positioning doesn't always work very well. Even after setting up a TimezoneMap widget in isolation that's exactly the same size as the one rendered by ubiquity (751x277, established visually) and managing to get it to select Asia/Jerusalem, I can't be certain that that's possible in ubiquity itself. I think we need a small rethink of how mouse operation of the map works with small regions. We don't have a great deal of installer development time this cycle, so I'm not proposing anything large, but this does need some attention.

Jan (comment #2) is correct that we used to have a zoom facility on the map. Unfortunately it caused extensive problems of its own and we eventually removed it a few releases ago. Jeremy (comment #6) is also correct that you can simply type in a city name. That's not too bad as a workaround, but the mouse-navigation facility is present and should therefore work well, not just sort-of-well. As evidenced by this bug, only working sort-of-well is a liability.

I have some thoughts on how this might be improved, but I'd like Evan's feedback on those, as they will certainly involve interface extensions to libtimezonemap. The current library interface is as follows: you click on a point and get a signal back telling you about the closest location to that point. Inside the library, it sorts all the locations in the timezone database by their Euclidean distance from that point. If the library offered some way to get hold of the sorted list, rather than merely the first element in the sorted list, then we could do a much better job of the UI in ambiguous cases.

As far as the UI is concerned, there are a few possibilities I can think of that would be better than the current behaviour. We could allow you to click repeatedly on the same point, or close by (not everyone will have the motor coordination to click on the exact same x/y coordinates more than once, and it's harder with a mouse than with a trackball or trackpad), and cycle through the top n nearby locations. Alternatively, we could set the closest location but also pop up a drop-down box with the top n nearby locations, so that it's obvious that you can select another one without having to enter its name directly.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(Please note that most of the other relevant people who might be able to help with this bug are now on holiday until 2012, so I ask for your patience.)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

In http://liorkaplan.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/cant-select-my-country-on-the-ubuntu-installation-map/#comments, Russ Allbery suggests applying population weighting. I can see the appeal of that. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of volatile data to have to keep up to date, and we'd still have to deal with much the same problem; if you live in location A, it doesn't really help you to know that more people live in nearby location B.

[Evan (ev)]

Colin,

We have population weight in the geonames.org data, so it's a possibility for Internet-connected installs.

I had a look through the code, and while there used to be functionality to go to the next closest location on multiple clicks in the same *exact* area (we should expand this to a small radius), this was dropped when we picked up the C port of the timezone map.

Part of fixing this bug should be adding that functionality back. I also chatted with Matthew Paul Thomas about making the ability to do this a bit more obvious, but neither of us had any good ideas there.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Supporting multiple clicks would do, I think. Do you have time to either do this or walk me through it for alpha-2?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Evan, with Colin out I think the ubiquity bits fall to you as well. Is this on track for beta1?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package libtimezonemap - 0.3.2

---------------
libtimezonemap (0.3.2) precise; urgency=low

  * Use AC_CHECK_LIBM. Thanks Loic Minier!
  * Cycle through timezones on mouse clicks within a 10 pixel square box
    of the previous click (LP: #905754).
 -- Evan Dandrea <email address hidden> Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:13:49 +0000

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Stephane says that this doesn't actually require an ubiquity fix, it's using libtimezonemap's .gir.

[Stéphane Graber (stgraber)]

I can confirm one can now select Jerusalem, though it sometimes requires 2-3 clicks for the map to cycle through the nearby cities.

The search also seems to work for me, looking for the various cities mentioned in the blog post.