Hacking timezones and stuff

Fun little coding session tonight, I made tzsetup use d-i's country information to nearly automate the selection of the timezone. Now installers can just hit enter most of the time, or choose from a short list, instead of fumbling through the badly organised zoneinfo layout. Of course this is waiting on the countrychooser from Christian P. to become really useful, but it vindicates splitting country from language selection in my eyes -- by getting accurate country information up front, d-i can have much better defaults for stuff like time zone selection, and the install becomes simpler overall.

Anyhow, it was fun to survey all the weird time zones out there. If anyone knows why it's significant today that some parts of Canada "did not observe DST 1966-1971", lemme know. Now if only Kentucky and Indiana would get their acts together and stop ruining the US timezone list for the rest of us.. (Don't even get me started on the evils of DST.) But it's astonishing how much code we waste on our antiquated, baroque timekeeping system.

The rest of the day was random bug fixing, and Mom's 61st b-day.