Ugh. You'd think the creators of a multiregion database would realise half the planet has Autumn the same time as the other half has Spring.
> It also eliminates the mental gymnastics needed to figure out how old a release is
I guess not.
I guess I must have known they did have a real meaning, but my "consumer" grasp of them was more like vague marketing fluff that meant "will probably be out eventually"!
I'm similar to you, though I don't even have the excuse of living with different seasons - I just never really thought about it.
If someone says “coming in the Spring” I literally have no idea when that is. The dates of seasons are meaningless.
Seasons are dumb. I remember reading a rant on the Internet once that advocated that we should recognize two seasons - summer and winter. You could put the boundary at equinoxes, with summer encompassing both traditional summer and spring, and winter encompassing traditional autumn and winter. The definition would be simple: summer is when it's kind of warm most of the time, winter is when it's kind of cold most of the time. I remember this resonating with me much more than the traditional definition.
Going back to temporal coordinates, the older I get the more confident I am in feeling that, for terrestrial use, anything that's not an ISO 8601 date is garbage and should not be used.
At least in the part of the US I'm from, we only used "Fall" for "Autumn", because colloquially it was already defined as a simple and pretty tight (but often slightly different each year) period: When the leaves on trees have changed color, but not yet all fallen off.
A JPL intern from Spain basically told me that the day end when sunset in Spain, it's very easy there. In California sunset can be around 5 pm and that's too weird for her. From the a quick google look, it seems like Spain daylight start from 6am or 7am and end around 8 or 9 pm. It's super interesting.
When you see a season mentioned in American marketing it basically means they have no idea. If a company says "spring 2019" it could mean sometime in April, or on June 20, hours before the summer solstice.
I'd say they're only 10% off
Thailand technically has three and people only really reference one (“winter”)
Also, I know “summer” means you get more leeway on when to actually release but is “mid year” or “late 2019” or “around November” really that hard, especially given that from what I hear, your seasons all start on weird dates?? (In Australia seasons officially start on the first of a given month)
So any definition that goes by some restricted American version (as pointed out by people living in the U.S. here) of seasons is not really applicable to 90% of the world's population. As you dig deeper into the climate of different countries, states/provinces, regions, etc., you may probably find your 90% figure drop to 10% or less.
> Ugh. You'd think the creators of a multiregion database would realise half the planet has Autumn the same time as the other half has Spring.
The season name will only be produced in marketing materials mainly targeting North America and Europe. The technical product will be named "19.1". The season name will not appear in an install.
Except that the rest of the world sees the exact same internet and the services are available online through the world wide web, something anybody from anywhere (barring cenorship) can see.
Even if Cockroach Labs delivers a different website to people outside North America and Europe that don't reference the seasons, the rest of the world will still manage to happen upon either those materials of other people who reference the naming scheme used by those materials.
Why not save the hassle and just not bother with the season naming at all? There's enough evidence from the comment section to show such a scheme was insufficiently thought through for an internationally-available product available online that likely has an international community of users who will very likely chat amongst themselves, referencing marketing material not intended for everybody's consumption.