Bug#1789: 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
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