Debian bug report logs - #1789 time zone files not right Package: timezone ; Reported by: Raul Miller . ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Message received at debian-bugs: From tad.micro.umn.edu!rdm Wed Nov 1 11:21:14 1995 Return-Path: Received: from pixar.com by mongo.pixar.com with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #15) id m0tAiin-0005hNC; Wed, 1 Nov 95 11:21 PST Received: from rdm.legislate.com ([192.77.155.13]) by pixar.com with SMTP id AA10602 (5.67b/IDA-1.5 for debian-bugs-pipe@mongo.pixar.com); Wed, 1 Nov 1995 11:20:45 -0800 Received: by rdm.legislate.com id (Debian /\oo/\ Smail3.1.29.1 #29.33); Wed, 1 Nov 95 15:23 EST Message-Id: Date: Wed, 1 Nov 95 15:23 EST From: Raul Miller 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Acknowledgement sent to Raul Miller : New bug report received and forwarded. Full text available. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Report forwarded to debian-devel@pixar.com : Bug#1789 ; Package timezone . Full text available. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ian Jackson / iwj10@thor.cam.ac.uk , with the debian-bugs tracking mechanism This page last modified 19:43:03 GMT Wed 01 Nov