[Feature Request] Enhance usability of oem-config time zone picker by adding more U.S. southern cities

Discussion on this at UDS. Explination was the rest of the world does not think in time zones.

Though still the problem of choosing a region around Austin, TX will give you an Ubuntu update server in Mexico.

Possible solutions is to have better logic for places in the US or even add places such as Austin, TX to the map.

There seem to be many major U.S cities not on the map for different regions in the US. The real issues are :
           - For these time zone regions you will have a city way far north or south and the closest
             city to your region is in Mexico or Canada. So you end up with a update server in those
             countries.

In the U.S some key cities on the map that are not there are (these being big tech cities also):

              - Austin, TX (*cough* Dell HQ *cough*)
                    * When you click in the central Texas region, you end up with a city in Mexico.
              - San Francisco, CA
                    * When you click here you get Canada
              - Seattle Washington, WA
                    * When you click here you get Canada
              - Los Alamos, NM
                    * When you click here you get Mexico.
              - Orlando, FL
                     * When you click on Florida region, you end up in the Bahamas

Seems to mainly be that many Southern U.S. cities where left out.

I don't feel that the appropriate solution to this bug is to add more cities. The denser the cities are, the more people will get upset and/or confused that their local city isn't included, and eventually the page will turn into an unusable forest of dots. IMO, we need to be quite firm about keeping the UI under control here. We use city information from tzdata which is exactly the right density for the data we actually need to gather, and I'm not happy about going beyond that.

I suspect that a better fix for the actual bug as reported would be to try to do a better job of selecting a city in the same country as the region in which you clicked (although there would have to be some fuzz for smaller countries; this is a lot less obvious in Europe than in North America, for instance). If there's still confusion after that, it can be clarified textually.

I just committed a fix for this that adds an invisible line between US and Mexico (thanks to Ken Wimer). So now the first click near the southern US border should always give you a US city.

This bug was fixed in the package ubiquity - 1.99.13

---------------
ubiquity (1.99.13) karmic; urgency=low

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Update translations from Launchpad.
  * Upgrade to Automake 1.11.
  * Recent versions of intltool need GETTEXT_PACKAGE. It's great that that
    new requirement was documented nice and clearly. Oh, wait ...
  * Update desktop translation files against new source text; all languages
    need some retranslation work.
  * Update imported translations from gtk+2.0 2.17.7-0ubuntu3.

  [ Roman Shtylman ]
  * fix for (LP: #413159). Acceptable for feature freeze, but still needs
   work and further review
  * fix for (LP: #420226)

  [ Evan Dandrea ]
  * Fixes to the slideshow code.
  * Automatic update of included source packages: flash-kernel
    2.13ubuntu9, hw-detect 1.72ubuntu4.

  [ Michael Terry ]
  * Add Venezuela timezone (UTC-4.30)
  * gtk: Start cycling through cities on the second click, not the third
  * gtk: Don't have clicks on Texas use a Mexican timezone by default
    LP: #371509

 -- Evan Dandrea <email address hidden> Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:22:52 +0100

The bug task for the somerville project has been removed by an automated script. This bug has been cloned on that project and is available here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1305940