It would be very nice for gworldclock to display time zone abbreviations
somewhere within its GUI.

To illustrate, this announcement from gnomedesktop.org:

"bug day today [...] on 8AM EST to approximately 4 or 5PM EST.
[1300->2100UTC]"

(What..? Indeed!)

GWorldclock would be an ideal way to figure out exactly (and fast) what
local time these people are talking about, but I can't find back the
abbreviations "EST" or "UTC" or whatever. Europe/Amsterdam is CET according
to "date", but that still leaves me thinking what EST and UTC are.

So IMHO it would be a great practical advantage to have this handy tool to
show these abbreviations in addition to the more descriptive names of
timezones. (There are lots of other places where the abbreviations are used
instead of the names.)

Oh, and I believe gworldclock should be part of the standard GNOME tools --
if only to encourage non-debian folks to join the GNOME bug days ;-)

Thanks,

Stefan Rieken

Sounds like a good task for the display configuration I'm planning for a
future version, where you can choose what columns get displayed in what
format.

I don't know where the definitions are, though, they just seem to be defined
internally inside the definition for Europe/Amsterdam (for instance):

$ strings /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam
TZif
NEST
CEST

/usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab defines the latitude/longitude but doesn't
specify the time zone further.  Do you know where "CET" and friends might be
defined?

What I could do is provide a display of the underlying TZ variable (i.e.
"Europe/Amsterdam") to complement the current description.  But it was the
"CET" you wanted defined, not TZ, wasn't it?

Thanks for the praise :)

Drew

Drew Parsons writes:

You might be right. Others might also possibly prefer a "+0200" notation,
for instance. (FYI, "man date" says that is RFC 822 notation, and it often
is used in display of emails.)

This is all new to me, but well, you live and learn. Let's see. The TZif
format is some kind of clunky binary format described in "man tzfile" -- but
that turns out to be not so important. This is:

man strings(1) (emphasis added):

"For  each  file  given,  GNU  strings  prints the printable character
sequences that are AT LEAST 4 CHARACTERS LONG (or the number given with the
options below) [..]."

So, strings -n 3 /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam yields instead:

TZif
[...garbage...]
NST
AMT
NET
NEST
CET
CEST

Heh `:-)

Not sure if I understand this. You currently display "Europe/Amsterdam",
which is quite friendly, so OK. You could e.g. make this "Europe/Amsterdam
[CET]", or opt between selection of timezones by abbreviation, RFC code or
full name. I like the idea of displaying extra tabs for their different
names.

I admit it has some GUI implications, for a GUI which is currently very
simple and easy. (Hey, it's a wishlist bug, and this is just us
brainstorming, right?)

I was sorta serious, but I think I've forgotten to reply to a request for
proposals for the GNOME Fifth Toe release, package freeze and all. Not sure.

Greets,

Stefan

Dear submitter,

as the package gworldclock has just been removed from the Debian archive
unstable we hereby close the associated bug reports.  We are sorry
that we couldn't deal with your issue properly.

For details on the removal, please see https://bugs.debian.org/1120757

The version of this package that was in Debian prior to this removal
can still be found using https://snapshot.debian.org/.

Please note that the changes have been done on the master archive and
will not propagate to any mirrors until the next dinstall run at the
earliest.

This message was generated automatically; if you believe that there is
a problem with it please contact the archive administrators by mailing
ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org.

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Thorsten Alteholz (the ftpmaster behind the curtain)