If you create a location for Atlanta in the clock applet (eg, North America -> US -> Georgia -> Atlanta -> Hartsfield Airport), the clock guesses "America/Kentucky/Monticello" for the time zone, rather than the correct "America/New York". It looks like it's picking the time zone that is centered on the point closest to the selected location. Unfortunately, most cities in the eastern US are closer to one of the goofy microtimezones in Indiana or Kentucky than they are to New York or Chicago, where their real timezone is "headquartered". And while there probably *are* people in Miami who operate on the "America/Havana" time zone, it's probably not a good first guess. :-) If we don't actually have information about the geographical extent of the timezones, we should probably just avoid guessing completely.
Yes, this could be improved. For large parts of the world, we can probably get by simply by using the country information that is available in the weather locations database.
Upstream bug where this issue is being worked on: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=519823
To fix this, we need: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526015 (libgweather) move gweather-xml parsing code to libgweather http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526216 (gnome-applets) move gweather-xml parsing code to libgweather http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525451 (libgweather) add iso 3166 codes (and timezone hints) http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=519823 (gnome-panel) Cities associated with wrong timezone and we should also take: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525761 (libgweather) "Louisiana" consistently misspelled as "Lousiana"
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
this was actually fixed for F9, but never got closed