Debian bug report logs - #1789
time zone files not right

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From tad.micro.umn.edu!rdm Wed Nov  1 11:21:14 1995
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Date: Wed, 1 Nov 95 15:23 EST
From: Raul Miller <rdm@tad.micro.umn.edu>
To: debian-bugs@pixar.com
Subject: time zone files not right

Package: timezone
Version: 7.8-1

It looks like something's wrong with the timezone files.  I started
poking around when I noticed that my time was daylight savings time.
I could have sworn that it was set right yesterday (I remember setting
a battery powered clock by my computer -- this clock is set at the
right time today, but my computer is an hour ahead).

When I looked in /etc/localtime, it was a file -- not a soft link.  I
don't know if this is something I did, but it makes it difficult for
me to determine precisely which time zone I had set (I deleted the
file and moved in a soft link to EST5EDT -- which I presume is the
proper zone file -- but this didn't fix the problem).

Perhaps I need to reboot my system (or maybe log out or log back in)
to have a new zone file take effect -- however, this was not obvious
from browsing any of the manual pages that I've gone over today.

Anyways, I started running zdump on the files in /usr/lib/zoneinfo,
and noticed something odd -- when I was in the zoneinfo/US directory,
all of the files in the US directory are GMT.  Then, I popped back to
the zoneinfo directory and did a zdump on all files using find -- this
time they came out correct.

Furthermore, there appears to be a complete duplicate set of zone
files under /usr/lib/zoneinfo/right/ -- though I've not analyzed this
very closely.

Finally, on a hunch, I copied the EST file name to a different name
(foo), zdump also reported this as a GMT file.

Since this investigation, I believe I've found my problem (my DOS
clock is not set to GMT, so I'm using `clock -a` in /etc/init.d/boot
-- but I'll report that as a separate bug).

Here's the bugs, as I understand them:

(0) zdump is in /usr/sbin -- though you don't need to be root to find
it useful.

(1) either zdump is broken or the zoneinfo files are broken -- they
depend on the file name rather than file contents to determine their
time zone.  This makes /etc/localtime rather useless, because it
conceals the file name.

-- 
Raul