Time zone translations (TIMEZONES file)

[David Jarvie]

On Sat 6 December 2008 19:34:01 Chusslove Illich wrote:
> > [: David Jarvie :]
> > Judging by the small number of updates to the TIMEZONES file over the
> > years, it looks as if it must be manually generated somebody notices that
> > zone.tab has changed.
>
> I did exactly this once, some time ago and in a haste, as I haven't had
> time to look into it more thoroughly...
>
> > Can one of the updaters say, how is it generated?
>
> Last time I did it by a cat | grep | awk | ... sausage, but this is not
> really sufficient, especially if timezone comments go in too.
>
> So now I committed the script scoop-tzones.py (into same directory with
> TIMEZONES file), which should be periodically run to add any new timezones
> (and comments). It looks as if it does more parsing and processing than
> necessary, but it's in order to not loose any old information and to keep
> messages in good order when extracted.
>
> The question that remains is who, when and on which zone.tab is to run the
> script... (Running the script now on my machine resulted in 184 new
> messages for translation.)

Perhaps it should be run by anyone with a "standard" system zone.tab for their 
distro/operating system, and it should add (and not delete) any strings not 
already in TIMEZONES. That way, it might in theory eventually accumulate all 
the strings which any user might meet on their system. But even if that were 
to be agreed, there still remains the problem of how to actually get people 
on all the systems which have distinct zone.tab's to run the script and 
update the file.

In the meantime, at least the comments from somebody's zone.tab should really 
be incorporated, provided the translators find this acceptable. (I think the 
original request arose from translators - Anne-Marie can confirm this.)

-- 
David Jarvie.
KAlarm author and maintainer.
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm