[clug] timezone amusements.

[Tomasz Ciolek]

Hi All

It has recently come to my attention that timezone data that ships with Debian
and Ubuntu suffers from some (major, in my option) problems with time
zone naming abbreviations that are displayed by 'date' command and coded
into /etc/localtime. here is a summary of what I am seeing:

1. What seems to be happenign is that the debain tzdata package (which is
downstream build from gnu libc6 source) uses EST and EDT instead of AEST and
AEDT to designate Australian Eastern Standard time and Australian
Eastern Daylight Time.

2. Timezone defintions, when queries like this: 
zdump -c 2009 -v Australia/Sydney|grep 2008

produce this time zone defintion for standard time to daylight time
change over dates:

Australia/Sydney  Sat Apr  5 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Apr  6 02:59:59
2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600
Australia/Sydney  Sat Apr  5 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Apr  6 02:00:00
2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000
Australia/Sydney  Sat Oct  4 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Oct  5 01:59:59
2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000
Australia/Sydney  Sat Oct  4 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Oct  5 03:00:00
2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600

again this uses EST instead of AEST and there is no EDT or AEDT at all.

As far as I can tell this this is the relevant source of truth about
what Autsralian timezones are called : http://www.australia.gov.au/Time

What I am interested to find out:

1. is this is a debian and Ubuntu specific issue or a wider libc6 issue 
that is present in all Linux distributions (Gentoo, RH, Fedora, CentOS, etc)

2. if this is a libc6 issue, how do we get it fixed?


Why do I care: because there is a number of web application engines that
automatically set timezeone of the instance based on system timezone,
and I ams sick of trying to convince the applicatios that I am not in the 
Eastern USA...

regards
Tomasz Ciolek

-- 
Tomasz M. Ciolek	
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 tmc at vandradlabs dot com dot au 
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