Bug#183772: libc6: zoneinfo/zone.tab missing entries without /

[Angus Lees <gus@debian.org>]

At Fri, 07 Mar 2003 16:42:52 +0900, GOTO Masanori wrote:
> > /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab seems to only include timezones of the
> > form "foo/bar", excluding single component names like "NZ", "Japan",
> > "UTC", etc.
> 
> Is this bug?  

i was looking for a simple list of all known timezones, since
/usr/share/zoneinfo/ contains duplicates (like posix/) and some
"undesirable" entries like systemv/.

the comments in zone.tab imply that that file is exactly what i was
looking for - except that it seems to be missing several entries.

> > I note the checktab.awk script in the glibc source seems to only
> > check/cope with such names too:
> >  if (tz && tz ~ /\//) { ... zoneSeen[tz] = 1 }
> > 
> > perhaps that is why this omission has gone unnoticed. (glibc
> > build/test doesn't seem to actually run checktab.awk either..)
> 
> ...And does this cause a problem?  Is not this script only for
> checking when maintainer modifies zone.tab?

probably.  i mentioned checktab.awk only as a related side note.  i
don't consider it a bug that it isn't being run.

> I'm sorry I don't know timezone well, so please teach me what the
> problem is.

zone.tab isn't a documented feature (at least i haven't found zone.tab
mentioned in any libc/timezone documentation) - although i note that
tzselect(1) uses it (and tzconfig(8) should probably be changed to use
it).

if you like, i could change this bug to "tzselect(1) doesn't know
about single-component timezones".

-- 
 - Gus