Alternative Timezone Naming in Calamares

Calamares is a Linux system installer. During installation, it asks the user where they are on the globe, in order to set the timezone correctly on the installed system. Calamares displays the nearest timezone after you click on a map. I would like to leverage that a little for social good (or at least a tiny bit of awareness).

The last time I wrote about the Calamares timezone selector, I also said it is terrible.

One thing I do like about the timezone selector is that it supports translating the name of a timezone. That way, even though the string in the timezone database is Europe/Kiev – a relic of the time-period that the timezone database was conceived – it displays the correct Europe/Kyiv. That’s when you run Calamares in English, anyway.

I added timezone translations to Calamares because a friend asked for it, and then did a couple of Dutch translations. That is because Dutch has exonyms (names in Dutch for other places) and calls Berlin, Berlijn and Paris, Parijs. There is a timezone Europa/Berlijn. The official Dutch name – last I checked – of Kyiv is Kiev, though.

The current translations addresses only a tiny fraction of the timezones, most of them ones that I have personally paid attention to, and I’d like to change that.

So here is the social project: I want, for every timezone-location (in FreeBSD, those are listed in /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab) a local name. Please send them to me by email or as a change request in Calamares on Codeberg, the relevant file is tz_local.ts.

I imagine a lot of the ones in Europe will be unchanged, although I feel like Europe/Chisinau is missing accents, Europe/Athens should be Αθήνα. Those are relevant, but I’m more interested in imported names. The exonyms (what others call a place, like “Berlijn”) could be endonyms (what is the local name, like “Berlin”).

For everywhere where the name of the timezone was imported, I want to know what it would be locally, written locally. From Africa/Harare (this one might already be accurate, but for comparison purposes, pretend it was Africa/Salisbury, like in an atlas from 1922) to Australia/Broken_Hill to America/Edmonton (which could plausibly be ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ if we pick the Cree name for the area) to America/Santiago to Asia/Dubai (دِبَيّ in Emirati Arabic) they all deserve a local name and I’d like to make that possible in Calamares.